Two things, deliberately separate. Discuss and Review asks people to look at a page and say something; it changes nothing and stops nothing. Send for Approval asks named people to sign a draft off, and holds the page still while they do.
Both are in the Publish menu on a draft, and both address the same thing: a Sidebar Group.
Sidebar Groups
A Sidebar Group is a named set of people that work is sent to — Marketing, Ad Agency, Legal. Everybody in one picks up the page in their queue, and for an approval any one member can approve on the group's behalf.
They grant nothing. A Sidebar Group is not a role and is never consulted when deciding whether somebody may open a page: what people may read and change is still Settings > Permissions alone. Inviting somebody with no access to a page gives them a row they cannot open, which is why the invite dialogs say so against their name.
An administrator manages them at Settings > People > Sidebar Groups, or through Manage Groups on either invite dialog.
Discuss and Review
Pick Discuss and Review from the Publish menu, tick the people and groups who should look, and press Add to Discussion.
The ticks are the invitation list, not an addition to it. Unticking somebody withdraws their invitation, and sending the same list again does nothing at all — opening the dialog and closing it never re-asks anybody.
Those invited see the page in Tasks > Awaiting Your Review, with the last thing said about it and how much there is to catch up on. From there:
- view opens the page with the Sidebar already showing.
- Mark as Reviewed takes the row off your queue. A group invitation is marked by each member separately — reading it yourself does not answer for your colleagues.
- Leave Group gives up the membership. That is the whole group on every page, not only this one, which is why it asks first.
The Sidebar shows who was invited: people by name as faces under Contributors, and groups on the Out for Review line.
Nothing here locks the page. A page out for review is edited and published exactly as usual.
Send for Approval
Pick Send for Approval, number the people and groups in the order they should approve, and press Add Approval Chain.
The numbers are the chain: anybody without a number is not asked. Two people on the same number are asked together.
The page is locked from that moment, in that language, for everybody including you. The editor opens read-only with a banner saying why. The Sidebar stays open, and so do Optimize tests — what is frozen is the content the approvers are being asked to sign off. Other languages of the same page are untouched.
The workflow rule
One rule for the whole chain, set when you send it:
- After N days — Skip to next approver passes by whoever has not answered and lets the chain carry on; Wait leaves it until somebody acts. The clock runs on whoever is being waited on now, not on everybody at once.
- Cancel and reject after a date ends the chain whatever state it is in.
- Automatically publish after last approval publishes the approved version the moment the chain completes. Leave it off and the draft is simply approved, for somebody to publish.
Approving
Approvers see the page in Tasks > Awaiting Your Approval with their place in the chain. Open it with view and decide in the Sidebar, where reject and approve sit above the message box. Anything typed in the box goes to the discussion with the decision.
- You can approve early, even with people ahead of you. The chain still does not complete until everybody has approved, been passed by, or run out of time.
- A reject ends the chain. The page unlocks and goes back to its author, who sends a new chain when it has been revised.
- The author of the chain, and any administrator, can Cancel it at any time from the Publish menu. Anything already approved stays on the record.
What the Sidebar keeps
Every step writes a message into the page's discussion: sent, approved, rejected, passed by, cancelled. They are written by the CMS rather than by a person, nobody can delete them, and each one links to the version it is about — so "content was approved" is still a way back to the exact draft that was signed off, long after newer drafts have been started on top of it.
That matters more than it sounds. The chain approves one version. If somebody starts a new draft after the page unlocks, the approved version is still the approved one, and that is the one automatic publishing publishes.
What this is not
Cendia does not have a workflow engine, and this is not the beginning of one. There is one chain, over one draft, with numbered steps — no branching, no conditions, no scripting. Anything beyond that belongs in the platform your organisation already runs its processes in, which Cendia integrates with rather than imitates.