Add workflow actions to the Wagtail userbar

[lb-]

Issue Summary

• Since Wagtail 2.10 it appears that the userbar no longer shows the Approve/Reject buttons when a page is in moderation (aka within a workflow)

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open the bakerydemo or any new Wagtail project
2. Using the default page moderation workflow, mark a page as ready for review
3. Now go back to the admin home page and you should see the page listed under 'awaiting your review'
4. Hover over the page and click the 'preview' button
5. This preview page should open its own window, while signed in, so you see the Wagtail userbar (bird button)
6. Click the userbar button
7. Expected - the moderation/workflow approval button should be shown
8. Actual - no moderation/workflow buttons are shown

The page is awaiting approval - which shows on the Dashboard page and in the page actions but not on the userbar.

• I have confirmed that this issue can be reproduced as described on a fresh Wagtail project: no

Potentially broken since Wagtail 2.10

• Wagtail 2.10 (August 2020) Introduced the new workflow system - https://docs.wagtail.org/en/latest/releases/2.10.html#moderation-workflow
• https://docs.wagtail.org/en/latest/releases/2.10.html#move-to-new-configurable-moderation-system-workflow

PageRevision.submitted_for_moderation will return True for revisions passing through the old moderation system, but not for the new system

Potential solution

The wagtailuserbar template tag is in https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/blob/main/wagtail/admin/templatetags/wagtailuserbar.py#L65-L74

wagtail/wagtail/admin/templatetags/wagtailuserbar.py

Lines 65 to 74 in 849d4d7

	if page and page.id:
	if revision_id:
	revision = Revision.page_revisions.get(id=revision_id)
	items = [
	AdminItem(),
	ExplorePageItem(revision.content_object),
	EditPageItem(revision.content_object),
	ApproveModerationEditPageItem(revision),
	RejectModerationEditPageItem(revision),
	]

This instantiates the classes ApproveModerationEditPageItem & RejectModerationEditPageItem which are declared in https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/blob/main/wagtail/admin/userbar.py

wagtail/wagtail/admin/userbar.py

Lines 107 to 126 in 849d4d7

	class ModeratePageItem(BaseItem):
	def __init__(self, revision):
	self.revision = revision
	def render(self, request):
	if not self.revision.id:
	return ""
	if not self.revision.submitted_for_moderation:
	return ""
	if not request.user.has_perm("wagtailadmin.access_admin"):
	return ""
	if not self.revision.content_object.permissions_for_user(
	request.user
	).can_publish():
	return ""
	return super().render(request)

Ideally this logic would be updated to be similar to the logic used in the Dashboard (home) listing to determine the workflow state. Using something like revision.submitted

• A general clean up of the legacy submitted_for_moderation would be good to do also.

Technical details

• Python version: 3.0
• Django version: 4.0
• Wagtail version: 4.0RC
• Browser version: Firefox 103 macOS 12.3

[Lovelyfin00]

Hi
Can I try working on this?

[lb-]

Go for it @Lovelyfin00 - we will also need to ensure there are new unit tests for this behaviour. It's likely some existing tests exist for the userbar legacy moderation buttons.

[Lovelyfin00]

Ok
Thank you☺
Can you attach links to resources and previous issues that could help me?
I'm very very new to this @lb

[lb-]

@Lovelyfin00 this may not be a good first issue sorry - but have a read of the issue in full and try to reproduce the problem, then also read all the links to get more context. I'll try to find the PR that implemented workflow and add a link to it.

[thibaudcolas]

@Lovelyfin00 before you claim an issue, please make sure that you do have the appropriate skillset to do so! It takes a lot of time to curate issues so the problems are well described and potential solutions also covered. @lb- has already added plenty of details in the original description, and I don’t think there is much more to be said about this until you or someone else has done their own research.

If you’re still feeling very new to this – please do consider the good first issues only. They’re specially made so as to be approachable with very little background on how Wagtail works.

[thibaudcolas]

We’ve discussed this in today’s core team meeting – since this has been broken for such a long time, it’s unclear to us whether this is a bug for us to fix or dead code to remove and move on.

If any projects out there rely on this, or would want to rely on this if it worked, please let us know.

---

I’m not sure whether this code had ever been adapted to support workflows, so there may be quite a bit of work needed to make this happen. In particular I believe reject/approve support adding a comment everywhere else in the CMS, not sure whether it’d be a requirement to do this for the userbar too.

[laymonage]

Per my comment on #10968 (comment), I don't think this is a bug. Workflows can have custom tasks which can use custom forms, so approving/rejecting a task may require additional user input instead of just a click of a button. Adding approve and reject items to the userbar would require the ability to render the modal dialog for the workflow approve/reject views rendered by https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/blob/main/wagtail/admin/views/generic/workflow.py.

This might be easier to do once #9246 is done, as that means such modals will use the a11y-dialog, which is already included in the userbar as part of the accessibility checker.

And yes, we should remove the unused code for the legacy moderation system's userbar items. I've started #10968 to deprecate them so that they can be removed in the next major release.

Labelling as Enhancement.

[lb-]

Thanks @thibaudcolas & @laymonage - this all makes sense.

Thanks for updating the issue and labels.