Moving content through all of its necessary stops on the way to publication in Drupal can be a mysterious and complex process. Drupal core provides a "published or unpublished" switch for each node, but if your needs go beyond that--and they do--it's difficult to even know where to start. If your team has multiple contributors, editors, publishers, or translators working together, you can't necessarily rely on them to keep one another informed of progress (or lack thereof). Even if you did manage to create a workflow system, your users shouldn't need to be technical geniuses to follow it.

Workflow and Rules are two community-contributed modules that can quickly turn your site into a tightly controlled publication system. They operate as two halves of a functioning whole: Workflow creates and enforces content creation states; it tracks where each node is, where it's going next, and who's allowed to move it there. Rules quietly watches your site for specific activity, such as a node's workflow state change, and reacts by triggering everything from notification emails to automatic node publication. It can run custom scripts, too, if you have the coding chops to implement them.

Both Workflow and Rules are quite open-ended and a little daunting out of the box, but they can be broken down into non-frightening pieces. You don't need to be a coder to use them. We'll go through the process of installing both modules, creating workflows, and creating rules that react to them. We will simulate a real-world application that demonstrates how Drupal can solve your content management challenges.