Overview

The "Page approval with milestones" example workflow provides a page approval process that:

• always shows the last approved version to regular users,
• allows authorized users to securely work on the next (WIP) version and have it approved in the background. Once the WIP version gets published, it becomes the new public version.

Configuration

This workflow can be configured by changing the initial value of the following variables:

States

To cleanly mark the separation between "last approved" and "WIP" page versions, the workflow uses two states variables: "state" and "wipState".

state	wipState	Explanation	Page visible to regular users?	Page visible to reviewers?	Page editable by author?
WORK IN PROGRESS	WIP NONE	The page is a work in progress.
UNDER REVIEW	WIP NONE	The page is under review.
REJECTED	WIP NONE	The page has been rejected.
APPROVED	WIP NONE	The page has been approved, but not yet published.
PUBLISHED	WIP NONE	The page is published.
	WIP WORK IN PROGRESS	The page is published, and a new version is in progress.
	WIP UNDER REVIEW	The page is published, and a new version is under review.
	WIP REJECTED	The page is published, and a new version has been rejected.
	WIP APPROVED	The page is published, and a new version has been approved but not yet published.

means "Last approved version only"

means "WIP version only"

Inner workings

From a Confluence point of view, the WIP version is a child page of the last approved version.

Page restrictions

At each stage, the workflow applies the appropriate restrictions on both the "last approved" and "WIP" pages, in order to guarantee that:

• The "last approved" version cannot be edited while a WIP version exists
• Regular users cannot see the WIP version

WIP creation, publishing and deletion

• When a WIP version is created, the page (with its attachments) are cloned into the WIP version.
• When a WIP version is aborted, the WIP child page is simply deleted.
• When a WIP version is published, the WIP child page is cloned into a new version of the "last approved" page, and then the WIP child page is deleted.

Compatibility considerations

Search and export

Thanks to the dual-page approach, this workflow is fully compatible with Confluence's built-in search and export features. For example, regular users who export the page to PDF will always receive the last approved version, and not the WIP version which they don't have access to.