Need to save your work before it’s ready to go live? Want to set up an approval process for certain editors? LiveWhale 3.0’s draft and workflow tools have you covered. This page explains how drafts work, how the approval process is set up, and what editors at every permission level can expect.

What is a draft?

Drafts let you save work on an event without publishing it to the live calendar. There are two situations where you might be working with a draft:

• A new, unpublished event — we sometimes call this a “draft-only” event. It exists in the back-end but isn’t visible to calendar visitors until it’s published. Submitted events come through as drafts.
• A draft version of a published event — if you want to prepare edits to a live event without pushing them out yet, you can save a draft of those changes. The published version stays live and unchanged until the draft is published.

You can always find your drafts in the Open Drafts section of the Dashboard, which shows all drafts across your group(s) in one place — handy for making sure nothing gets forgotten. Individual drafts are also easy to spot in the Events manager, where they’ll show a small Draft badge next to their title.

What can be edited in a draft?

Pretty much everything. Drafts can include changes to any field in the event editor: title, summary, description, URL, image, categories, tags, privacy settings, Live/Hidden status, and more. Until the draft is published, none of those changes will be visible on the front-end calendar. That includes status and privacy changes: if your draft changes an event from public to private (or live to hidden), it’ll stays live until you publish.

Who can publish?

Most LiveWhale editors can both save drafts and publish events directly. But administrators can mark specific users as requiring approval to publish. Those users can only save drafts—their changes won’t go live until a curator or administrator reviews and publishes them.

Here’s the quick summary:

• Most users – can save drafts and publish events
  
  
  
• Users marked “Approval required” – can only save drafts; changes must be approved before publishing
  

The approval workflow

If you’re an editor who requires approval, here’s what the process looks like:

When you create or edit a draft, you’ll see a “Ready for review” checkbox. Checking it will change the event’s status to Pending and send a notification to the curators assigned to your group, letting them know there’s a draft awaiting their review.

You can use the “?” button to see a list of designated curators. If no curators have been assigned to your group, you’ll instead see a note letting you know that any other publishers or admins can approve your draft (but you’ll have to notify them outside of LiveWhale, in that case).

You can continue editing a draft while it’s awaiting review—marking it ready for review doesn’t lock it down.

Curator notifications

When a draft is marked ready for review, curators are notified by email and a new ”Drafts awaiting approval“ section shows up in two places in the back-end:

• A panel at the top of the Events manager, which shows pending drafts for the current group
• A section on the Dashboard (with a badge), which shows pending drafts across all that user’s groups

Comparing a draft to the published version

When reviewing a draft, there are two ways to see what’s changed:

• Preview draft: Click the “Preview draft” button at any time to open a front-end view of the drafted event in a new tab. This is the quickest way to see the full picture of how the event will look once published.
• Field-by-field comparison: Individual fields in the draft editor will show a small compare icon (a  blue pencil-and-paper) whenever that field has a drafted change. Clicking it opens a quick side-by-side view of the Published vs. Draft versions of that field.

Setting up approval permissions (Admins)

Administrators can configure the approval workflow from the Users manager. There are two relevant checkboxes on each user’s settings:

Approval required to publish – If checked, draft events created or edited by this user must be approved before changes are published to your live calendar.

Mark as curator for events requiring approval – If checked, this user will receive notifications of all events requiring approval created in their group(s). Drafts can also be published by other users with sufficient permissions, or by administrators.

Curators don’t have to be the only ones who publish drafts—administrators can always step in—but designating curators ensures the right people are notified and keeping an eye on the queue.