Drupal document workflow for NGO's to smooth out bureaucracy

Something obvious struck me today while going over a few ideas with a client for refactoring their current site (which is largely a collection of static html pages), this organisation maintains their public interface via this website, the company itself is an NGO and benefits a certain east-timorese cause

Immediately it was obvious they have a lot of bureaucracy, most changes to the site had to be run past a higher authority some 3000km's north in east-timor, now this isnt really my problem - unless I was the contractor willing to sit by and wait for changes to be approved and then do small amounts of work at a time - but i'de rather empower the client and build them a system that allows them to automate this process themselves.

I've been working a lot in workflow related business process implementation websites using drupal's excellent stateful workflow/actions module combination, but this could be an easy case, allow me to demonstrate - below is a UML state diagram that we could attach to any node type, in this case we could attach it to a 'page' node type.

The red dot at the top is where it starts, nothing actually exists at this point but this is could the start state, you could think of this as it exists as someone is completing the form ready for submission :D, when it is submitted the workflow automatically transitions to "pending", at this point a number of things could occur in drupal.

• An email is sent to someone to alert them of a new node to review
• Someone in the office could approve the article and it may move to the "reviewed" state
• The articles state could be moved BACK to "pending" if the review fails
• If the review is successful, and someone has the right access level, it can be transitioned to "published"
• Maybe you'de like a view that only displays pages in the "published" workflow state.

Another way to achieve the same result, without getting involved with workflow and actions is to use the built in "Publishing options".

This also allows you to set (and you can configure it so these options are set by default for different content types) - what the status of this new content is, similarly you can also build a view of this, maybe you'de like a view of only published nodes, and then an internal admin list of all nodes that are unpublished.