WordPress is a platform that focuses on publishers. The project’s mission is to “Democratize Publishing“.
However, WordPress does lack some key features that most publishers need. One of these missing features is custom statuses. The current choice for WordPress users is between “Draft” and “Pending Review”.
Here’s a typical request from one of our PublishPress customers: “We need a way to mark our posts as Draft, Filed, First Read, Second Read, Hold, Killed, etc.”
Most content management systems have a statuses feature. This screenshot below is from the Optimizely platform. They offer statuses including “Draft”, “In Review”, “Approved”, “Scheduled”, and “Rejected”.
This next screenshot is from a platform called “Amplience”. They have statuses that include “Ready for translation”, “Rejected”, “Legal review”, “Approved”, and more.
There have been proposals to support custom statuses in the new block editor, but there’s some distance left to travel before this can arrive in WordPress.
So over at PublishPress, we’ve been working on a way to help WordPress publishers with custom statuses.
Introducing the PublishPress Statuses plugin
PublishPress Statuses is the solution to your workflow problems in WordPress.
- Click here to download the latest release from Github.
- Here’s a guide to using PublishPress Statuses.
This new screenshot gives you an idea of what you’ll see with PublishPress Statuses. This plugin is optimized for the new block editor but should also work with the Classic Editor plugin.
You can create and edit your own custom statuses. This release has support for pre-publication statuses. The “Draft” status is fixed because moving it would break other parts of WordPress. But after “Draft”, you can customize the other workflow steps.
You can choose which users are able to move posts to each status. In this screenshot below, only users in the Administrator role can move content to the “Assigned” status.
What’s next for custom statuses?
There’s also a bunch of other features that are in development for the Statuses plugin. Those features include:
- Create different workflows for different post types.
- Choose who can edit content in each status.
- Custom statuses for revisions so you can moderate content changes.
- Custom statuses for published content.
