Approving Content

When auto-approval is off, a resource or publication a user submits sits in a pending state until an administrator publishes it. This page covers finding that queue and clearing it.

Two components on the hub queue what users submit: Resources and Publications. If your hub does not take submissions from members — a hub that is a website with a tool or two on it, run by one office — the queues stay empty and there is nothing here for you. If it does, this is the job that has to be done promptly rather than well. A submitter who waits a week to hear whether their dataset was accepted assumes the hub is abandoned.

A worked scenario runs through the page: the hub has just been named in a published paper, a dozen groups have registered, and eight datasets and two tools are sitting in the queues on Monday morning.

Turning auto-approval on or off

This is the decision that determines how much of the rest of the page you ever do. Auto-approve is No on a stock hub, so everything a member submits waits for you. That is the right default for a hub whose reputation rests on what it publishes, and the wrong one for a hub whose members are all known colleagues, where it just adds a day's delay to everything.

If your hub is somewhere between the two — trusted people plus the public — leave Auto-approve at No and list the trusted accounts in Auto-approved Users instead. Their submissions skip the queue; everyone else's waits.

Both components that queue submissions carry the setting in their Options (the Options button in the component's toolbar).

Resources — see the generated parameter list:

Parameter	Label on screen	Default
autoapprove	Auto-approve	No
autoapproved_users	Auto-approved Users	empty
autoapprove_content_check	Auto-approve Content Check	No
email_when_submitted	Notify Upon Submission	{config.mailfrom}
email_when_approved	Email When Published	No

Auto-approved Users is a list of usernames whose submissions skip the queue even when Auto-approve is off. Auto-approve Content Check requires an auto-approved front-end submission to actually have content before it is accepted.

Publications — see the generated parameter list — has the same first two: Auto-approve and Auto-approved Users.

Resource states

A resource's state is the published column, and the admin list's Status filter offers every one of them:

Value	Filter label
2	Draft (external)
5	Draft (internal)
3	Pending
0	Unpublished
1	Published
4	Trashed
-1	Archived

Only state 3 is the approval queue. The other unpublished states are drafts the author has not submitted, or items an administrator has taken down.

Clearing the queue

Monday morning, eight datasets waiting. This is the round trip:

1. Go to Components → Resources.
2. Set the Status filter to Pending.
3. Open each one by its title and read it. Approval is a publishing decision — the licence, the access level and whether the description says what the thing actually is are all yours to check, and nobody else will.
4. Tick the resources to approve and select Publish in the toolbar, or set the status on the edit form of the one you have open.
5. For anything you are not publishing, leave it pending and tell the submitter why. Unpublishing it instead takes it out of the Pending filter, and it is then in a state nobody is looking at.

Publishing is reversible: set a resource back to Unpublished and it leaves the site, with nothing lost. Nothing on this screen deletes a submission.

Publishing stamps the publish-up date and, if Email When Published is on, notifies the submitter. The resource then appears in browse and search for anyone its access level allows.

Publishing requires the core.edit.state permission on com_resources. A resource checked out by another administrator is skipped.

Publications

Publications move through a curation workflow rather than a single pending flag, and the admin list's Status filter names each stage:

Value	Filter label	Meaning
3	draft	Author is still working
4	ready	Posted for review
5	pending approval	Awaiting an administrator
7	changes required	Sent back to the author
1	published	Live
0	unpublished	Taken down
2	deleted	Removed

Publications take longer per item, so do them second. Go to Components → Publications, filter to pending approval, and open a publication to review it. The curation panel walks the manifest block by block; each block is either approved or sent back, and a publication with any block outstanding moves to changes required rather than published.

The mod_mycuration module gives curators a site-side list of the items assigned to them, split into Review and Pending changes.

Where the counts come from

The Resources dashboard panel counts each state directly:

		$queries = array(
			'unpublished'   => 0,
			'published'     => 1,
			'draftUser'     => 2,
			'pending'       => 3,
			'removed'       => 4,
			'draftInternal' => 5
		);

		foreach ($queries as $key => $state)
		{
			$database->setQuery("SELECT count(*) FROM `#__resources` WHERE published=$state AND standalone=1");
			$this->$key = $database->loadResult();
		}