Web Editors Forum Breakout Sessions

Thank you to everyone who attended the Web Editors Forum in August! Work has begun on the action items we discussed. 

If you could not attend the forum, the UCM web team would still love to get your responses to the questions asked in the breakout sessions. Add your questions and comments to the document. Contact Shelli Minton if you have any questions. 

The UCM web team would like to remind editors about the purpose and functionality of “Draft” state and “Needs Review” state on Drupal nodes – we have received feedback that these have been improperly used by editors. After making a webpage update, but before selecting the Save button, editors need to make a decision about what will happen next: 

Draft: 

Save a page as a draft if you are still working on it. You can use the Preview button or save as a “Draft” to see what the page will look like. When a web page (node) is saved as “Draft,” the page is saved in Drupal, but the page updates are not visible to the public. A draft node is only visible at the webcms link after logging into Drupal. 

Needs Review: 

An editor should only save a page as “Needs Review” when it is ready to be checked by a publisher and published live. Saving as “Needs Review” sends an email notification to the publishers in that page’s group. The expectation here is that the page is complete, they need to review it and then publish the changes onto the live site. Make sure you add a note to the revision log so that publishers know what changes have been made. Also, when a node is in “Needs Review” status, users in the Editor role are not able to modify the content until the node state returns to either “Draft” or “Published.”

Please make sure you add a short description to the revision log about the changes you made, each time you save a page as Needs Review or Publish. (You don’t need to add a revision note for each time that you are saving the page as a Draft.) This will allow anyone who reviews a revision to see what changes were made on the page. The note could be as simple as “Updated intro section text” or “Changed hyperlink to X page” or “Updated stat about enrollment.” 

As a follow-up to last month’s Web Matters newsletter, in order to ensure all users have consistent, up-to-date knowledge and practices, please self-enroll and complete all four courses by December 18, 2026, to maintain Drupal access. 

Please contact Shelli Minton at sminton@ohio.edu with any questions.  

Training: 

The Web Editors Forum is a monthly meeting for all web editors, publishers, and content managers. We come together to discuss topics of interest to the group to improve our websites and the processes we use.

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 at 10:00am
Topic: TBD -- Bring any questions, concerns, or ideas

Open labs are offered so that web editors can schedule focused time to work on their web pages and have assistance available. Shelli Minton, Web CMS Training & Support Manager, will be logged in to answer questions as needed.

Schedule: every Tuesday 2:00-3:00pm and every Thursday 9:00-10:00am

You can add the labs to your calendar by checking the meeting details in the forum general discussion.