We want to implement a validation workflow but native contentful status are not enough.
We’re thinking of adding the missing status in the content model but I wonder if this could be done through an sidebar UI extension that would provide our status (ready for translation, translated, approved…)
Since we’re working with many locales, those status should be available for all our locales, independently and we should be able to configure the access to the status depending on the role.
I know that’s a lot but is it manageable through an UI extension ?
You can do exactly as you describe, but it also could be done with predefined values on a short text field called "Status’ that is localized. So your content entry would have a status field with predefined values of “ready for translation”, “translated”, “approved”, etc and there would be a separate value stored for each locale. This can be done with Contentful’s webapp and without a UI extension. Would that accomplish what you are looking for? I suppose it will depend on how you are implementing your validation workflow, but I hope this is helpful!
One related idea I’ve been working on (but have yet to finish) is a sidebar extension for per locale publishing. It can be difficult to deal with localized content that you want to be published if however not all localizations have been completely finished/translated/approved. How to publish the content which has been completed/translated/approved and not publish the content which is still in progress/unfinished/unapproved? My idea is essentially to have a sidebar UI extension with a “publish approved localizations” button which would
look at the current entry and make a copy of the field values for each locale which does not have a status of “approved” (or whatever criteria you might set)
replace those localized field values with either:
blank/empty data if never published before or
the previously published values if previously published
publish the entry
from the copy made in step 1, restore the not yet approved field values to the entry so authors/editors/translators can continue to work on them.
We’re going to implement the status localized field solution but we find it a little confusing for end-users and the best would have been to have the kind of solution you describe using a sidebar extension (maybe not that detailled but at least a way of publishing locales independently)
I didn’t think that I would find such a detailed description of the exact problem we’re currently facing. Having to remove unfinished translations, then publish, then re-add the unfinished translations is really annoying.
I would love to hear more if/when this extension is created!
I haven’t finished the extension yet, but something else I wanted to mention that might solve the problem is a localization pattern called entry-level localization. Read more about it here
