Stop contributors from going Live to Live

I too am looking for a way to do this.

It seems that once content is Approved (live state), lower level users can then see Approved on the edit form and save again as Approved (when really it should be kicked over to Draft/Review after a change).

Also, despite permissions, once content is Approved and Published, lower level users cannot edit it anymore, despite being the author or authenticated (both have permission to edit Approved state content).

For every person who wants to be able to pull the workflow out of Live when edited, there's someone else who has set up their editors so that they want things to stay in the same workflow state when edited. So the basic functionality of Workflow isn't going to change at this point.

But there are two other solutions to get what you want:

1) Use Rules or Action/Triggers to kick the story from Live to Draft or Moderation when it's edited in live state.

2) Write a small module to tweak the behavior, probably using form_alter to remove the Live option from the workflow and force the user to submit the article to Draft or Moderation, or to do what Rules would do on form_submit and kick it back tot he correct workflow when saved.

@Kevin - For your permission issue, I would take a close look at any other limiting factors you may have on the user's permissions. Do they have edit-content ability and the like? If you need to you may need to rebuild your node permissions.

I gotcha. It was one extra permission I did not see (huge matrix) to disable. I get the desired behavior now.

Great! I had a feeling it was something like that. Glad to hear you've got it worked out.