Building a Content Approval Workflow Without a Custom Build

Your content team publishes directly to production because there is no review step, and you have found errors on live pages more than once. A structured approval flow — draft, in review, approved, published — catches problems before they reach users. You can build this in ContentGrid without writing a custom workflow engine.

Using Entry States as Workflow Steps

ContentGrid entries have a status field that you control. By convention, use these four states to model a simple workflow:

• draft — editor is still writing, not ready for review.
• in-review — editor has submitted, waiting for a reviewer.
• approved — reviewer has signed off, ready to publish.
• published — live on the site.

Define these as a fixed-choice field on your content types. Editors set the status manually in the ContentGrid editor. Restrict the published status to users with the Publisher role using ContentGrid's role-based access control.

Setting Up Webhook Notifications

ContentGrid fires a webhook on every entry save. Use this to send Slack notifications when an entry moves to in-review:

• In Settings → Webhooks, create a new webhook pointing to a small API route in your Next.js app at /api/cms-webhook.
• In the webhook handler, check the entry's new status value.
• If status is in-review, send a Slack message using the Slack Incoming Webhooks API with the entry title and a link to the ContentGrid editor.
• If status is approved, notify the original editor that their content is cleared to publish.

Restricting Who Can Publish

ContentGrid roles let you restrict field-level write access. Create two roles:

• Editor — can write to all fields except the status field when the value is published.
• Publisher — can set status to any value including published.

Assign the Editor role to content writers and the Publisher role to senior editors or tech leads. This prevents writers from bypassing review by setting their own entries to published.

Triggering Deploys on Publish

When an entry status changes to published, trigger a Vercel deploy or revalidation so the content goes live:

• In your webhook handler, check if status changed to published.
• Call the Vercel Deploy Hook URL for your production deployment.
• For ISR setups, call res.revalidate('/path/to/page') instead to avoid a full rebuild.

This workflow — draft, review, approve, publish-and-deploy — gives your team a structured process without buying an enterprise CMS or building a custom tool. It uses plain ContentGrid features and a small amount of webhook handler code. Most teams implement it in half a day.