Approvals & Approval Workflows
Configure multi-step approval chains for publishing, social posts, and bulk operations, and work the approvals queue.
Approvals & Approval Workflows
Audience: Enterprise teams that need content, social posts, or bulk operations reviewed before they go live.
Overview
Approval workflows let you require one or more reviewers to sign off before content is published. There are two places to work with approvals:
- Settings → Approval Workflows (
/settings/approval-workflows) — create and manage the workflow templates. - Approvals (
/approvals) — the review queue where pending requests are approved or rejected.
Approval workflows are an Enterprise feature. On lower plans the pages are visible but locked behind an upgrade prompt.
Creating a workflow template
Templates are configured per website, so pick the website first. Each template has:
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | Label shown in the review queue (for example "Blog publishing review"). |
| Trigger | When the workflow runs: Pre-Publish, Pre-Social, or Pre-Bulk Operation. |
| Steps | An ordered chain of approval steps. Each step has a role and an optional auto-escalation window. |
| Active | Only active templates create approval requests. |
Each step is assigned to one of the team roles: Owner, Admin, Editor, Social Manager, or Marketer. Any team member holding that role for the website can act on the step. Add as many steps as you need for a multi-stage chain (for example Editor → Admin → Owner).
How triggers map to content
| Trigger | Applies to |
|---|---|
| Pre-Publish | Article drafts being published. |
| Pre-Social | Social posts being scheduled or published. |
| Pre-Bulk Operation | Bulk operations such as mass publishing or mass updates. |
When an action fires and an active template matches the trigger for that website, ScaleBlogger creates an approval request instead of completing the action. The resource stays in a review state until the chain finishes. If no active template matches, the action proceeds normally — approvals never block a website that has no workflow configured.
Reviewing requests
The Approvals page lists every request for the selected website and shows:
- Resource — Article Draft, Social Post, or Bulk Operation.
- Workflow — the template that created the request.
- Progress — the current step out of the total number of steps.
- Status — pending, in progress, approved, rejected, escalated, or cancelled.
- Requested — when the request was raised.
Open a request and choose Approve or Reject. You can attach a comment with the decision.
- Approve — advances to the next step, or completes the request when it was the final step.
- Reject — stops the chain immediately and marks the request rejected. The content stays unpublished.
Every decision is recorded against the step it applies to, so you keep a full history of who approved what and when.
Auto-escalation
A step can define an auto-escalate window in hours. If nobody acts within that window, the request is marked escalated so it stands out in the queue. Escalation flags a stalled review — it does not approve the content automatically.
Tips
- Keep one active template per trigger and website; extra active templates only add ambiguity.
- Start with a single-step Editor review and add steps once the process is working.
- Set auto-escalation on the first step so drafts do not sit unnoticed over a weekend.
- Deactivate a template instead of deleting it when you want to pause reviews temporarily.
- Pair approvals with the Audit Log so approvals and publishes can be reconciled later.