Issue Manager WordPress Plugin
Since we started the Code4Lib Journal, we’ve had a persistent problem of editors accidentally publishing articles early (i.e., before the issue was officially published). Our first workaround for that was to remove the ‘publish_posts’ capability from the editor role. With that capability removed, only the administrator (i.e., me) could publish articles.
That worked, but it was a hassle, as it required me to do what should have been the coordinating editor’s job of publishing each article when it came time to publish a new issue. For that matter, even if permissions weren’t an issue, the publication process would still be cumbersome: open every article in the issue, change its status to “Published”, and save it, doing them all as fast as you can so people didn’t find a half-published issue when they came to the website.
It was to fix these and other problems that I created the Issue Manager WordPress plugin. It connects the publication status of an article to the category it’s in. You can designate a category as “Unpublished”, so that no articles in that category can be published. If you try to publish an article, it’s status changes to “Pending Review”. When it’s time to publish an issue, you change its category’s status to “Published”, which publishes all the “Pending Review” articles in that category. More…