Our site continues to grow with many content authors contributing content. Our content manager has received a few complaints about delays and lack of approval of submitted content. It took a little thinking but we have figured out the problem. There is no easy way to see or know about Category (descriptions) that have been submitted for approval.
When logged in as an Approver in Edit mode the options box displays above each editable instance of EP. Within this box in the Statistics section are two hyperlinks: ## Items waiting for approval and ## comments waiting for approval
At the moment our site shows34 items waiting for approval 0 comments waiting for approval
However, if you click the items waiting for approval link and enter Manage Content the Approver only sees 5 Articles in All Categories with the status of 'Waiting for Approval'. Our content manager didn't know why the number was wrong in the hyperlink but just continued to process new submissions figuring all were being handled.
The problem is that the remaining 29 items are actually Categories that have been submitted and currently have the status of 'Waiting for Approval'
I'm sure an email is sent by the system alerting the content manager/Approver that the status of a category has changed but with so much activity on the site and so many emails they all just get sent to a Personal Folder in Outlook via a rule to keep the clutter down. She never looks at the emails and instead manages the activity right in the Manage Content page of EP.
Our site has a few hundred categories with many child, grandchild and great grandchild categories. There is no easy way to know if the status of any category is 'Waiting for Approval' unless you click into each category and then change the status to 'Waiting for Approval'. Once we started exploring each of the categories this way we found lots of category (descriptions) that required review and approval.
This is very cumbersome.
Can EP be enhanced in Manage Content in the Category section to include an 'All Categories' option similar to the Article section so that if an Approver set the status to 'Waiting for Approval' any category needing review would be obvious to see at a glance?
It almost seems like this view should include every category in the system with children indented but somehow highlight items containing the selected status such as 'Waiting for Approval' or 'Edit'. Maybe a little jQuery expand/collapse to show items with the selected status.
I could set up an account for you to view our site if that would be helpful.
Thank you in advance.
- Dan