Between “finished” and “fit to publish” stands a person.
A draft does not end when the machine is done. It ends when someone with a name stands behind it.
What you can do with it
- Approve a draft — with a record: “Approved by X on Y”, right on the draft and as a marker in the list.
- Take an approval back; the act stays traceable in the history.
- Approve twice without breaking anything: timestamp and person stay unchanged.
- Track the approval rate in the funnel on the overview surface — it is the last stage there.
The thinking behind it
A draft's journey ended at the state “generated”. There was no state in which a person had said: this can go out. That left no line between “the machine is done” and “the desk agrees” — and the funnel had no bottom.
The obvious route would have been to set the status to “approved”. That would have broken the application: the state “generated” is used as a filter in thirteen places, among them the outward feed. An approved article would have vanished from all of those queries.
So approval lives in fields of its own. Both are independently true: generated AND approved. Name and email are stored as a snapshot, so a later name change does not retroactively alter the record.
Without a person, an approval is worthless.
Improvements
Approval introduced
Drafts can be approved and reopened. Approval remembers the moment and the person; a withdrawn approval stays in the history. Approving without a signed-in user fails with a message that says why.
The funnel has a bottom
The overview surface shows approval as the final stage: what share of drafts a person actually signed off. Everything before it is preparation.
Give feedback or ask a question
Missing something, bothered by something, unsure about something? Write it down here — it goes straight to the people working on this feature.