Problem: Within the Content Editor, our web editors with the privileges to edit content as well as publish that content are often forgetting to go to Edit>Approve and Publish, instead they are just saving and trying to press the publish button which publishes to master, but not the live production server. I understand that approve and publish puts the page into the final workflow step, and (atleast on our servers) the publish button does not. I'm wondering if the Publish button can be changed to function as 'Approve and Publish' and whether that will cause any issues for people who have editor privileges but not publishing privileges.
Along those same lines, our admins can save and publish with the publish button without approving by using Edit>Approve and Publish, but they cannot do this with new pages. New pages have to be approved and published once and from that point on they can simply save and then publish with publish button and the content goes live. Is there any way to bypass that initial 'Approve and Publish' step for admins?
I have some experience working in the core as well as editing the workflow, but I apologize if this is a really simple problem, or if I'm missing the point of the way our workflow is setup. I also considered creating an Approve button and putting it next to edit, so that our editors were more likely to remember that step, but I couldn't find an approve command to associate with the new button. I would love some feedback from Sitecore veterans.
Changing the behavior of the publish button is not recommeded and will just end up confusing everyone. Also adding a new button will just lead to more confusion about which button your editors should be using.
Since your editors have to use workflow, they probably don't need access to the standard publish button. Simply removing them from the Sitecore Client Publishing role will make it so they can't see the publish button and therefore have to use the workflow command.
If workflow is turned on, a new version of an item will always be put into the first step of that workflow. You could change that behavior with a handler for the version:added event. If you are only concerned about new items, a processor for the uiAddFromTemplate pipeline could also be used. However, I don't recommend changing this behavior at all. For that matter, I don't recommend using full admin users for content editing at all since you will lose the versioning of your content items. Admin users should be used for administration, not content editing.