Technical details for workflow
Workflow is probably best explained by example. On the right you see a diagram representing the business rules for pages of the qi site. Pages have three states, private, pending and published. When a user creates a new page, it automatically goes to the private state. As shown in the diagram, in the private state, only the creator and managers (site administrators) can view and edit the page. Other user roles, anonymous (not authenticated) visitors, members and reviewers cannot access the page or even know the page exists.
When the creator decides that she's done with the page, she can submit the page for publication. The page's state thus changes to pending. In the pending state it can only be edited by managers and can be viewed by reviewers. While in the pending state the creator might decide that she wants to make more changes and so can retract the page to private. But typically, a reviewer or manager will check the page and decide to publish it.
Pages in the published state can be viewed by anyone but only managers can edit them. At any time the creator, a reviewer or a manager can decide to retract the page to the private state and essentially hide it from all others.
In this way we design workflows that cover your own use-case scenarios, enforcing your own business rules.
