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Writing great content is only one part of content production, the entire creation process is much more involved. Drafts, reviews, edits, approvals... all of these things happen in every organisation's content strategy. Workflow in GatherContent streamlines this process so the right people are involved throughout your content's journey, and at the right time.

Let's start with the basics.

In GatherContent, workflow is a series of steps. Typically these start at Draft and finish at Published or Completed, but your workflow is fully customisable to suit your needs (Scale and Transform plans). This includes giving each step a name, a description and a colour. Use colour wisely, as it is used to help you quickly identify the status of your content.

Creating and managing your workflow might sound complicated, but we've made it a simple and intuitive process.

First, make sure you're in a project. In your top navigation, head to Workflow. All projects have one workflow by default. Scale and Transform plans can manage multiple workflows, whereas Start plans only have one basic workflow.

Each 'card' represents a workflow. Clicking on a workflow will take you to the workflow editor. Clicking 'New workflow' will also take you to the editor, where you'll be given a blank canvas to create a workflow from scratch.

Each project has a designated 'default' workflow. This workflow is used automatically for newly created items and is also the workflow that you can see represented as a colourful bar on the project cards in your account dashboard.

On the bottom-left of the workflow cards, you'll see a number. This number indicates how many items are using that workflow. Clicking on this button will take you to the content hub with those items automatically filtered.

Tip: If you want to delete a workflow that is used on items, you'll be asked to choose a new workflow to replace it. When this happens, those items will all be placed on the first step of the replacement workflow.

Before you start editing a workflow, please note that any change you make won't be saved until you hit the 'Save changes' button.

At the top, you'll see the name of the workflow. Click on the name to change it.

Below the name, you'll see a description box, where you can describe to your team the purpose and use case of the workflow.

Each workflow step is represented by its own container. This is where you edit the step colour, name and description. You can also specify a workflow step to be read-only. When an item is active on a read-only step, the content cannot be edited (commenting is still possible).

To add a new step, simply click on the 'Add a step...' button at the bottom of the workflow. Alternatively, you can duplicate existing steps.

Instead of manually assigning/unassigning team members from items as they progress through a workflow, we can do it for you. When you assign people to workflow steps, they will be notified and assigned to the item when the step they're associated with becomes active.

Similar to workflow assignments, you can remove the manual process of specifying due dates for every item in your project by setting up automated due dates. There are two options:

Tip: It is possible to use both types of due dates in the same workflow. When doing so we recommend only setting the fixed due date on the final step to prevent items from becoming unintentionally overdue.

Reordering steps is as simple as dragging and dropping. Find an empty space on the step you want to reorder, click and drag. For quick reordering of adjacent steps, you can use the up and down arrows.

We don't limit the number of steps a workflow can have so they can be as flexible as you need them to be. However, consider your team using the workflow and try to make them as clear and concise as possible to keep your content operations running smoothly.

If you want to learn more, check out the following guides relating to workflow: