Collaborative content editing on a Drupal 7 site

Most Drupal sites require more then one person to be able to edit content on the site.
While out of the box Drupal does not support a great collaborative experience, you can easily enable this functionality using a few contrib modules and configuration.
This post expands on the How to let users create 'unpublished' content in Drupal

The following is a basic recipe for a simple site "Editor" role, You can easily split the editor to more then one role if needed, and or create more granular permission sets:

Better user and content management views

I always start by installing Administration Views and Views Bulk Operations (VBO).
This makes both the content and user views much easier to use.

Basic Permissions

Unless we develop our own content admin section (easy with custom views) we should provide the following permissions to the "Editor" role:

• Administer content
• Access the content overview page

Unless the theme has good support for content editing you should assign the permission to the "Editor" role:

• View the administration theme

If this is a multilingual site you should assign the permission to the "Editor" role (or a "translator" role):

• Translate any entity

If you use any node queues (queuing promotional contant ect.):

• Manipulate queues
• Manipulate all queues

Content type specific access

The following rules are need to be set per contant type:

• {type}: Edit any content
• {type}: Create new content
• {type}: Delete any content

Note that we are choosing the "any content" version of the permission and not the "own content" we find that in a collaborative environments you cant have a single person responsible for one piece of content.
Of course you can easily change this so editors can edit each other content but not delete it by changing "Delete any content" to "Delete own content".
The above is only a starting point and each type may have different configurations, for example on many of our commerce sites we don't allow the creation and deletion of products as those are managed from external systems however we do provide editing and translation of those.

Publish/Unpublish content

Drupal core out of the box does not support multiple users being able to publish and unpublish each others content, see How to let users create 'unpublished' content in Drupal for more details
In short you need to install the following two modules:

• override_node_options
• view_unpublished

and for each of your types provide the following permissions:

• Override {type} published option.
• {type}: View any unpublished content

Other configurations

Media and file permissions (if applicable):

• Import media files from the local filesystem
• Administer files
• Edit file

And finally remember to make sure that users have access to the relevant input formats.