SapphireIT Editorial Workflow

SapphireIT Editorial Workflow adds a real editorial process on top of the posts

you already have. Every managed post gets a workflow status, an assigned

reviewer, a due date, workflow comments and a complete activity history —

managed from a Gutenberg sidebar, a classic editor meta box and an admin

dashboard.

Six statuses, one clear path: Draft → Writing → Review → Needs Changes →

Approved → Published, with explicit paths for sending content back and for

re-editing something that is already live.

What it does

• A real state machine. Only the moves in the transition graph are possible.

Nobody jumps a draft straight to approved, whatever their role.

• Server-side enforcement. Every transition is re-checked in PHP against the

graph, the capability map and the post’s current stored status. The editor UI

shows you what you can do; it does not decide it.

• Six dedicated capabilities, granted to roles at activation and editable

with any capability-management plugin. No hard-coded role checks.

• Reviewer assignment and due dates, with an “overdue only” filter computed

in your site’s timezone.

• Workflow comments that stay in the editorial log and never appear on the

front end.

• A complete activity history in a dedicated indexed table: who changed

what, when.

• Conflict protection. If two editors act on the same post at once, the

second one is told the post moved instead of silently overwriting the first.

• An admin dashboard with server-side search, filtering, sorting and

pagination, row actions, and bulk actions across up to 100 posts.

• A documented REST API under sit-cwm/v1. Everything the UI does is an

endpoint you can call yourself.

• Works with what you have. Posts, pages and any custom post type, through

post meta. No custom post type of its own, and nothing to migrate.

What it deliberately does not do

Being straight about this matters more than a longer feature list:

• It does not send email. Assigning a reviewer notifies nobody in version

0.

• It does not publish anything. Reaching the “Published” workflow status

records that the editorial process finished — it does not touch the

WordPress post status. Publishing stays a deliberate action by a human. The

two are separate fields on purpose, so that scheduled posts keep their

schedule and live content can be re-edited without being unpublished.

• No Slack, no editorial calendar, no multiple workflows, no rules engine. Those

are on the roadmap, not hidden behind an upsell in this plugin.

Who can do what

• Draft, Writing, Review — sit_cwm_change_workflow

• Needs Changes — sit_cwm_review_content

• Approved — sit_cwm_approve_content

• Published — sit_cwm_approve_content plus WordPress publish_post

Every change also requires WordPress’ own permission to edit that specific post.

By default administrators get everything, editors can review and approve,

authors and contributors can move their own content up to Review, and

subscribers get nothing.

Developers

The plugin is built as a thin React client over a PHP workflow engine, and fires

actions and filters at every lifecycle point ( sit_cwm_status_changed,

sit_cwm_can_transition, sit_cwm_transition_map and more) so it can be

extended without editing its files.

Privacy

The plugin stores, in your own database: the user ID of whoever makes each

workflow change, the user ID of the assigned reviewer, the text of workflow

comments and the time of each action. This information is visible to users who

have the sit_cwm_view_activity capability. Nothing is sent off your site.