Publication Wokflow

The actions of reviewers act on the workflow state of content. Most documents in this site (News items, (web) Pages, Events, Links, etc.) can be in the following states:

• Visible and editable only by owner (private)
• Visible but not published (visible)
• Waiting for reviewer to publish internally
• Published only to Mars Society members
• Published to all but anonymous visitors
• Waiting for reviewer to publish externally
• Public

The job of the reviewer specifically occurs for documents in the two "Waiting" states, but lets go over all the states in a little bit more detail. Documents are created in the Visible state by default. In that state, any logged in Mars Society member can see the document, and no one else can. The difference with "Published only to Mars Society Members" is that certain document types show up in special places when they are published (news in the news portlet, events in the calendar, etc. See the site organization section below). If the creator of a document (the owner) does not want anyone else to see it, they can make it private. Owners can change the state of a document between private and visible as often as they want without involvement of reviewers. If an owner wants to submit a document for publication, they can change the status to one of the two Waiting states; they cannot change the to one of the three published states themselves. That is where reviewers come in. If there are documents in one of the waiting states, reviewers will see a link to them in a portlet on their site when they log in, and they will be able to either publish them or reject the request (in which case the document goes back to the visible state). Once a document is published, their owner cannot change the document state or edit it anymore. Before they can do that, a reviewer or manager must "reject" the document back to a non-published state.

Authors are only given to option to submit for internal or external publication, but there are three published states. The intent is to allow the author to dictate if they want their content to be published only to Mars Society members or not. If the author submits for external publication, the reviewer is the one to decide if it should be only published for web site members, or to the public at large. We have not worked out a specific policy of what should be published to web site members only, so for now, it might be best to always publish to all.

If reviewers reject a document for publication, we ask that they use the "advanced..." option in the state drop down menu and that they explain the reason for the rejection in the comments field, so that the author can see why his request was rejected. A document might be rejected for publication "permanently", because, for example, the content is not appropriate for publication, or it might be "temporarily" rejected, if the document is deemed to be worth publishing but needs work (too many typos, factual errors, etc.). We recommend to make it clear in the rejection comment if publication might be reconsidered once fixes are made.

Keyword assignment, proofreading, and effective dates

Besides approving or disapproving publication requests, we ask reviewers to also review the keywords assigned to a document and to perform proofreading services on documents for which they approve publication.

Reviewers are given permission to edit document content and properties while a document is in any "waiting" or "published" state. We ask that reviewers make use of good judgment as to what they edit themselves in the document. Typos are clearly OK. Changing paragraphs or the document title obviously is not (unless the author has specifically said that it was OK to "fix up" their document in their submittal comments). If you think that drastic changes are required, you should explain what needs fixing in the comments section (go to the "advanced..." option in the state drop down menu) and reject the request so that the author can make the change(s) themselves and then resubmit.

Reviewers should always check the keywords assigned to the document in the "properties" tab. Keywords (also called subjects) can be useful to search for specific document categories. Often, authors probably won't have set any keywords. We hope that as they get experience, reviewers will get a feel for what keywords to assign to a document. Due to a kludge in the current site design, we ask that you never assign the "TMS Project" keyword to a document that you publish. It is OK for an unpublished document to have this keyword. The reason is that this keyword is how we currently populate the "projects" portlet. We hope to fix that issue in the future.

While you are in the properties tab, you may want to check the Effective and Expiration date values. The Expiration date may be especially worthwhile to set. If for example you approve a news item for publication and the news has to do with a timed event (for example, there are always a lot of news items related to the convention, about the auction, hotel reservations, etc.), there is no point for that news item to remain displayed once the event has passed. When an expiration date is set, the document will still be public, but will not be displayed in the "special places" once that date has passed.

Organization of the site

This explanation of how the site is organized may help to understand the publication process more.

Under the current setup, everyone can see the Title and Description of published content, no matter at what level it is published, so if a document is published only to Mars Society members, make sure that the Title and Description does not give everything away.

Published, but non-public content is marked by the two planet lock icons. The "Earth lock" tags content that is only published to web site members and the "Mars lock" tags content that is only published to Mars Society members. As described above, an anonymous visitor can see the Title and Description of such content, but if they attempt to access the full content they will get a login screen.

Events, News and Links are currently the three content types that benefit the most from being published for general authors.

The most recent published news items show up in the news portlet on the right hand side of most pages, below some hand-picked priority items on the home page, and in the news tab.

The most recent events show up in the upcoming events portlet on the right hand side of most pages. Because we currently tend not to have many event anouncements at once, there is no dedicated tab for events, and the calendar portlet is not displayed.

Any published link content type may show in the "random exits" portlet on the left side of most pages, and in the full listing accessible through that portlet. Reviewers should therefore be careful not to authorize publication of links do not apply in that context. We are looking for links to entire Mars related web sites, not links to external event announcements, external news, etc., which should be handled otherwise.

The items above can be published directly from the members' own folders, i.e. once published, the documents remain in the author's folder, and the system knows to find them there. The other content types that members can add in their folders are folder, file, image, and page. The only benefit of publishing these other items is if the author wants them to be accessible to non Mars Society members (who can access that content anyway as long as the author has made it visible -- instead of private). For example, a member could write a home page for himself, and that home page would have to be published to all by a reviewer for that member's home page to be viewable byy the public at large.

The paragraph above also applies to groups. Chapters and task forces have their own group in this site, which also has a folder into wich group members can add content. Reviewers might get requests to publish content that has been placed in one of these groups (for example, a chapter's "home page" or event). There is no difference in how to deal with content in group folders from the point of view of the reviewers.


The task forces and visit a chapter portlets (on the left side), contain links to a few chapters or task forces picked at random, and a link to the full listings. These are generated automatically from Plone user groups.

The projects portlet, on the left side, contains all links to published documents with the "TMS Projects" keyword, so again, reviewers should not give that keyword to content they publish without consultation with managers. This is a kludge, and we will be looking at better ways of dealing with projects.

The photo of the day portlet, on the right side, is directly administered by Brian Enke, who is his own reviewer for that content only.

The Mars books & more portlet, on the lft side, is generated automatically by picking two books at random from the Marspapers library. Therefore, in order to add more books to display there, they must be added as Marspapers content.

The Marspapers are managed by Frank Crossman, who is his own reviewer for that area. Members cannot add marspapers content types to their own folders. Marspapers can only be added in the folder managed by Frank Crossman, and memebrs in general cannot add content there. We may set up a process so that members can submit their Marspapers themselves at some point.

The content tab contains content that is organized hierachically as a set of folders. Reviewers normally do not have to deal with content in that area, which is managed by the webmaster(s).