When publishing a workspace with unpublished content, a cryptic error message appears

Improvements to the Workspaces / CM integration are tracked here: #3085747: Consider improving the default editorial experience when Content Moderation and Workspaces are used together

My content authoring team is asking for this same UX enhancement.

It looks like content_moderation_workspace_access() was removed in #3242564: Workspaces can't be published from the command line in favor of a new event subscriber and method WorkspaceSubscriber::onWorkspacePrePublish(). So that's where the logic is happening now.

In case it helps anybody, I altered the Workspace display with a hook like so:

/**
  *  Implements hook_ENTITY_TYPE_view().
  */
function my_module_workspace_view(array &$build, EntityInterface $workspace, EntityViewDisplayInterface $display, $view_mode) {
  $build['changes']['list']['#header']['status'] = 'Status';
  foreach ($build['changes']['list'] as &$row) {
    if (is_array($row) && isset($row['#entity'])) {
      if ($row['#entity'] instanceof NodeInterface && !$row['#entity']->isPublished()) {
        $status = '⚠️ unpublished';
      }
      else {
        $status = '✔';
      }
      $row['status'] = ['#markup' => $status];
    }
  }
}

I restricted my check to nodes because we don't moderate anything else. A more sophisticated check could be used on sites that moderate of entity types.

It ends up looking something like this:

@danflanagan8 I think the issue is that the content that is stopping the publication of the workspace is in 'Draft' (via content moderation) rather than 'Unpublished'.

I'll create an MR to show the name(s) of the item(s) in draft.

Screenshots

Current state

The current state only tells us that "something" is blocking publication, but not "what" is blocking publication.

1 item blocking

Multiple items blocking

New state

If 1 item is blocking, the name of it and a link to it is appended to the end of the message.

If more than 1 item is blocking, we create a list of all the blocking items, with each linked to their canonical URL.

Published

Once everything is published, we continue with the same experience we currently have.