Changing the community/workflow of an existing content item is not a new idea but I really feel this needs to be implemented as a standard feature available in the content explorer. As mentioned here, University implementations need the ability to have many communities and workflows, currently I am thinking the best way to mange this in our environment is one community and workflow for each department editing pages through the CMS. However, it is inevitable that departments will merge or split, in these instances recreating the content items into the new community/workflow just doesn’t seem like a viable option since you would lose the entire content history associated with the item.
Here is our process for changing the workflow of a content item in our Oracle 10g, Rhythmyx 6.5.2 environment. I have not run into an error yet with this process, please let me know if you find any problems or have a better way to do this. Please be advised that this may not work in your environment and as always backup since this process isn’t supported by technical support:
Modify CONTENTSTATUS table:
[ul]
[li]Select * where CONTENTID=‘your content id#’
[/li][li]Change WORKFLOWAPPID to WORKFLOWAPPID # in WORKFLOWAPPS table.
[/li][li]Change CONTENTSTATEID to match appropriate STATEID # in STATES table.
[/li][/ul]
Modify CONTENTSTATUSHISTORY table:
[ul]
[li]Select * where CONTENTID=‘your content id#’, this will return all revisions of your content item, do the following steps for all revisions to ensure rollback capabilities.
[/li][li]Change WORKFLOWAPPID to WORKFLOWAPPID# in WORKFLOWAPPS table.
[/li][li]Change STATEID to match appropriate STATEID # in STATES table. (Remove any revision states that are not found in the new workflow.)
[/li][li]Change ROLENAME to match appropriate ROLENAME in the ROLES table.
[/li][li]Change TRANSITIONID to match TRANSITIONID in the TRANSITIONS table.
[/li][li]I also changed the LASTMODIFIERNAME to match a community member, however I don’t think this is needed.
[/li][/ul]
In the future we are thinking about making this process part of an external jsp page that could automate the process for our admin users. I think this is where Percussion could step in with this feature request and make a stored procedure for use in the content explorer for a given content id (the current content item being modified) and triggered by the community dropdown which would extract the desired community id when a new community is selected.
We have implemented a drop down for the community and workflow within the content type but restricted to admins. This allows us to change the community and workflow of an item without mucking about with the db. I agree this should be standard for admin users.
A word of warning, if the new workflow does not have the same states and roles, this can cause problems. To get round this, move the item to a draft state (which all workflows should have) first.
You might look at the “tasks” capability in 6.6. It doesn’t sound like a dead on match for this kind of automation, but some of the “database cleanup” stuff can now be run as a task.
We’ll be running a customer webinar on 6.6 in a few weeks which should touch on tasks a bit.