Stumbled on the Required for Publishing module module and it got me thinking a bit.
One of the sites I am working on is going to implement Workflow for more or less all content published on the site. Some content types are going to be quite complex with a lot of required fields.
While a writer is working on a new article some of these required fields might not be fully know to them. The problem then is that they still will have to fill in the required fields to be able to save their work, even while in draft/unpublished. This of course opens up for that they fill in temporary "garbage" in those fields and then forget to change that when they publish it.
Basically the solution I thought up was to allow writers to save nodes in draft without having to fill in any required fields. Then when they are done with the content and are going to change stage from Draft to, for example, Proofing, Drupal's required check will kick in and alert them about the empty required fields.
I believer there are several benefits with something like this:
- It will allow writers to create "article ideas" as drafts only adding for example title and a short idea description in the body.
- Writers have one place for all their article ideas instead of keeping them in another place than the site.
- The writers will be able to fully focus on the main content and only need to fill in required fields when they are done and then also knows exactly what to fill in in those fields. This is especially useful for taxonomy.
Optimal would of course be if it was possible to configure this on a per field basis with the options:
- Always Required - Useful for the title so it is always filled in.
- Required for [stage(s)] - Adds the flexibility described above.
Would something like this be possible with existing features and modules?