Designing Draft-to-Approval Workflows That Prevent Duplicate Publishing

Short summary

A guide to building content approval workflows that prevent duplicate publishing. Identifies three root causes: items entering workflows twice, unclear state tracking, and misaligned human/automation processes. Proposes a five-part architecture with unique IDs, status fields, approval records, and a separate publish gate to distinguish readiness from completion.

• •Duplicate publishing stems from double-entry, unclear state, and misaligned human/automation processes
• •Use five-part architecture: unique ID, status field, approval record, publish gate, and single intake point
• •Separate 'ready' (approved) from 'done' (published) to prevent retriggers from causing duplicates

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