Creating a mass scheduled update to next Workflow status?

Actually, Editions is one of the reasons why I need this functionality; the newspaper site I'm building will be using Editions so we can lay out pages online before they're visible to the public.

The problem is the stories that go on the Editions. We will be using Workflow for the stories; they will go into "Ready to place" status to indicate that the stories are ready to be placed in Editions. But then the stories need to go to "Public" about the same time that the Edition publishes (probably around 1 a.m. each day).

The stories can't go Public early because when they're Public, the Relevant Content module will pick them up and list them (and we don't want readers able to access tomorrow's stories today!).

There is a Drupal tech in the corporate office (on the other side of the country from me) who is trying to build a solution for me using VBO and Rules and Flag ... but his first attempt resulted in immediate publishing, rather than scheduled publishing. So we're still trying to come up with a solution!

http://nodeone.se/drupal-planet/make-rules-dance-with-views-bulk-operations looks like it might solve the problem very neatly.

Arrggh, just wrote this all up, was waitin for my internet connection to come back up (middle ages here) and my comp proper crashed on me.

So, yeah all of the approaches I mentioned are user-friendly, though a bit less developer-friendly :)

1. Filter the related content view: add a filter to the view so that it only displays article titles if the parent edition is published, even if the article itself is published.
2. Make custom action: write a custom action that publishes the children nodes of the edition. Create a triggered rule that executes when a node of type edition moves to the published workflow state, and that executes the custom action.
3. à la nodeone: create a VBO view that accepts an edition's NID as an argument, displays all of the children of the edition, and has publish as its operation. Then create a triggered rule, similar to the previous method's, that programmatically executes the VBO view when the edition's workflow state changes to published.

For the end-user, all of these are easy, as they rely on one workflow state - the state of the edition node. This can be changed easily with the workflow scheduler. I'd avoid the first method as it forces your system to ignore an article's published flag, and that could cause other problems (or more complex views) in other situations. Depending on how you have created the relationship between editions and articles you might need extra modules to create appropriate filters and relationships in your views. There's a module called relativity (among others) which lets you define complex child <-> parent relationships. If the children articles have nodereferences to the parent edition then you don't need any extra modules. If you have nodereferences in the parent edition, then you'd want to use something like nodereferrer to create a view of the children with an argument of the parent NID. (You can also create explicit back-references using rules, but I think that's an error-prone and over-complicated approach.)

Were it me, I think I'd go for the third option and use nodereferences. If you'd like any more details, please ask.

Thanks,

Andy

Absolutely, sorry I'm obviously not being very clear. I'm going to ignore suggestion #1 from my list above and try and describe the other two a bit better.

What we're doing is triggering a rule to run when the edition itself is published. The rule then publishes (or changes workflow state, or whatever you want) all stories attached to the edition. The scheduler included with the workflow module can handle publishing the edition at whatever time you want. So all you need to do is to create the triggered rule. The ideas in #2 and #3 are analagous - in #2 you're creating a custom action to publish all stories attached to the edition; in #3 you're using VBO to publish all stories attached to the edition.

The key point, either way, is that nobody manually touches the stories' status. When the edition goes live, the rule gets triggered, and the stories have their status automatically changed.

I think the easiest method is #3, as it involves no coding. The easiest way to implement #3 is if you have a nodereference to the parent edition in every story. Things get a bit more complicated if you have a nodereference to the stories in the edition. What kind of relationship between the editions and stories do you currently have?

Glad it's solved. Just in case, the methods I described can work with multiple parents: you just need to put the nodereference in the edition and use a module like nodereferrer to create the view.