WordPress as a document management system–’Post Forking’ and ‘Edit Flow’ Plugins

Document management is a little different from content management. The goal of content management is to allow end users to edit live content – and have it appear instantly (publish).

Document management involves a more complex workflow – and typically includes multiple users working on the same document (collaborative editing).

  

With the power of wordpress, apart from document workflow, you get basic features such as user management, comments, forums etc. all for free.

 

Collaborative Document Editing

 

Post Forking is a plugin that helps with multiple edits to the same document (by forking the document – allowing multiple people to work on different copies of the document)

 

Forking Supported User Roles

Contributors can create new documents, but they cannot upload documents. Contributors can also download published documents.

Authors can create and upload new documents. They can also download publicly published documents and edit their own documents.

Editors can work on all documents, delete documents and manage workflow. They cannot add new users to the system.

Administrators can perform all tasks and they can also add new users to the document management system.

 

Supported Document workflow

Edit flow is a plugin that lets you define a custom workflow.

It comes with Custom Statuses which lets you define the stages of your workflow. A sample workflow might be:

•  Draft – Default saved mode (auto save)  
• Assigned – Editor or Admin assigns a post  to an author.
• In Progress – Author puts it in this mode to identify that he/she is working on the document.
• Pending Review – Once author is done with the changes, they submit it for an editorial review.
• Ready for Publishing

Custom User Roles and Membership Management

s2 member is a powerful membership management plugin for WordPress®.

 

 

Scalability

Scalability for wordpress has come a long way – and there are tools to help scale both – number of wordpress users – as well as number of hits.

·         WordPress scalability to half a million users

·         Million hits a day

 

 

 Summary

While wordpress wasn’t initially meant to do collaborative document editing, a couple of simple plug-ins (Post Forking and Edit Flow) make it possible to easily add document management to your wordpress site.