Publish requirements

Pro only.

A requirement is a question with a yes/no answer about a piece of content. Does it have a lead image. Is the meta description filled in. Has legal seen it. Does the copy pass the house style guide.

Requirements are checked when a piece moves into a gated stage — the sign-off moment — rather than when it is saved. That distinction is the whole design: Craft can already mark a field required in a field layout, and that is a save requirement, which stops a writer saving a half-finished draft. Insisting on a meta description at that moment is insisting on it at the wrong moment.

Two severities

Required blocks the move. Somebody holding Sign off despite failing requirements can push it through anyway, and doing so is written into the history with their name and the requirements they overruled.

Advisory never blocks anything. It shows as a warning in the entry sidebar and counts in the report.

There is no third severity that silently rewrites content. A governance tool that edits the copy is a governance tool nobody trusts.

The requirement types

Type	Checks
Required fields	Named fields are not empty. Native attributes (title, slug, postDate) work too.
Minimum length	The named fields add up to at least n words.
Related content	A relation field holds at least n things, optionally all with alt text.
Has a publish date	The entry has a post date, optionally one still in the future.
Has an owner	The piece is assigned to somebody.
No open comments	Every editorial comment has been resolved.
Manual checklist	Boxes a person ticks. For the rules no software can check.
Passes RedPen	The copy is clean against your RedPen style guide.

Each is scoped by section and by stage. Leave both empty and it applies everywhere, on every gated stage.

Some notes that save an afternoon

Required fields skips what it cannot find. A handle the entry's layout does not have is skipped, not failed — so one requirement can cover several entry types without failing every piece that sensibly lacks the field.

Related content counts, it does not test truthiness. A relation field is never empty in the sense that matters: it holds a query object, which is always truthy. Counting is the only honest answer.

Minimum length is a blunt instrument on purpose. It is not a quality measure and does not pretend to be. It catches the specific failure of a placeholder going live, which is the most common thing a desk publishes by accident.

Manual checklist ticks are cleared when the entry is edited. A sign-off is about a specific version of the text; letting it survive a rewrite is worse than not having one.

"I don't know" is not "no"

A requirement that cannot run reports itself as skipped, and a skipped requirement never blocks.

That matters most for the RedPen requirement. RedPen not installed, RedPen's backend timed out, a profile handle that no longer resolves — none of those mean the copy has been found wanting. They mean it has not been read. Treating them as failures would mean uninstalling an optional dependency locks a whole desk out of sign-off.

The same applies to a requirement that throws: a broken requirement is a broken requirement, not a failing piece of content. Somebody's custom gate having a typo in it should not become everybody else's worst day.

Caching

Verdicts are cached on the editorial record so that listing 200 pieces does not run 200 checklists. The cache is trusted only while it is at or after the entry's own dateUpdated: any verdict recorded before the last edit is about a version of the text that no longer exists, and a green tick against prose somebody has since gutted is worse than no tick at all.

By default the checklist re-runs whenever a managed entry is saved, which keeps the sidebar honest without anybody pressing anything. Check again in the sidebar forces it.

The publish guard

Settings → General → Refuse to publish an entry whose requirements fail.

Off by default, and the default matters. Blocking a stage move is a conversation between colleagues. Blocking a save is a wall between somebody and their work.

Sites that need the wall — regulated copy, medical claims, anything with a legal review — turn it on knowingly. Even then it is narrow: it bites only when a save would make an entry genuinely public, never on a draft, never on a disabled entry, never on one with a future post date, and never for somebody holding the override permission. And if the checklist itself throws, the save goes through — a broken requirement must not become an unpublishable site.