[META] support (basis for a contrib) Translation Editorial Workflow (support for revisions for translations of entities)

Thanks for creating this meta issue Cathy as it is a great place to discuss and better understand the workflow needs for content. I'm going to write up a number of typical use cases for this over the weekend and post it here.

I agree that most of the workflow stuff will be handled in contrib, but that we need a greater understanding of the needs to be able to add support for that in core. Editorial management of translations might at a first glance seem pretty easy and straightforward, but in reality it is very complex and particularly the workflow functionality needs are many.

I think its important that the content creation workflow and the translation workflows are in principal the same, but with some important differences such as:

• Not all the content on for example a node need translations.
• Users might be able to only translate existing content, not create new.

However, to complicate stuff, take a product page as an example. While the product name is often the same, not translated, for most languages there are exceptions. The name might be trademarked by someone else in a country and thus will have a different name there. Then you have languages that doesn't use the same alphabet such as the Latin compare to the Chinese.

While the use of different alphabets mean that all product names will have to be rewritten, the trademark example above is much more complicated. This because it is for an individual product (node) and specific country. So, question is how to handle that?!

So, what's needed here is:

• Be able to configure the translatability on a per language basis.
• Be possible to override those settings on a per node basis.

This also requires two separate UIs too. The per language is done in the backend by the sitebuilder in the entity configuration, while the override is done by editorial users in the frontend. The override also needs its on permission setting so its only available for certain users.

The trickiest problem though is how to handle the trademark example above as it is really a territorial issue and not a language.

How flexible will the language support be in D8? Will it be possible to have versions in for example British English, Australian English and US English?

Oh, then going back to our IRC conversation earlier, work is in progress to use State Machine in Workbench Moderation.

While I haven't tested in myself, I have spoken to several of the involved Palantir developers and they said that State Machine will allow for highly flexible workflows compared to the simple Draft, Review and Publish it currently has.

I'm afraid my knowledge of the internals of Drupal is too limited to judge exactly where it belongs.

In general it is a field level access case for the entity, but the example where the individual content item requires an override making it possible to just translate that particular title needs to be handled in the editorial workflow.

Then you also have the case where the two languages uses different alphabets. Then all the text content field will have to be translatable in practically all cases. But that is most likely managed from the entity editing UI. That is, if D8 allow that kind of language control.

Unfortunately I had no time during Saturday to get to start writing up those use cases I promised as something important came up. I hope to be able to get started on it Sunday though. Those use cases should allow us to work backwards and better understand what is needed in core for contrib to then be able to build it.

Hi Guys,

Sorry for the delay on delivering the writeups, but I have some big personal problems to sort out at the moment.

However, I just saw this tweet from @fago:

today santa brought the long overdue 1.0 release of the entity API module - with full revision support :-) drupal.org/project/entity #drupal7

While I do understand that http://drupal.org/project/entity_translation is probably doing something different to handle the translations, I still think it is worth mentioning here as it could help us be able to get both workflow and revisioning working for translations too.

Merry x-mas all.

Updated issue summary added support simple and editorial workflow issue to the todo meta list.

I suppose this can be closed. There are still plenty of bugs and issues between revisions and translations, but clearly this issue isn't actively used anymore.