Edit Flow stores custom editorial statuses as a taxonomy backing the post-status dropdown, editorial metadata as postmeta under keys prefixed _ef_editorial_meta_, and editorial comments as standard WordPress comments with a custom comment type. The Story Budget and Calendar are useful overview surfaces — but neither gives you a flat, sortable, filterable list with the editorial fields as proper columns.

SleekView reads the post table joined with the Edit Flow status taxonomy, pivots the editorial-meta keys into named columns, and exposes User Group assignments as a filter dimension. Custom statuses become a multi-select filter rather than the single-pick dropdown the default admin offers — "Pitch OR Assigned" becomes one saved "unstarted" view rather than two separate clicks.

Inline edits write through standard post APIs so Edit Flow's notification module fires the same way it would from the post editor. The downstream PublishPress Planner fork uses nearly the same data structures, so a SleekView built for Edit Flow ports across with minor configuration. Editors get the cross-cutting visibility the Story Budget hints at but doesn't fully deliver.

Editorial workflow plugins fail in a specific way: they ship a calendar and a budget board, both of which are visual overviews, and they treat the per-post editor as the place where actual work happens. The gap is the middle layer — the daily editorial review, the standup queue, the "what's blocking us this week" question. The data to answer those questions is fully present (Edit Flow stores statuses, due dates, assigned editors, word counts, briefs), but it's accessible only through one-post-at-a-time editor surfaces or through visual aggregates that don't filter cleanly.

Managing editors compensate by maintaining parallel state in spreadsheets or project trackers, which immediately drifts from the WordPress reality. The fix is a flat, filterable, multi-status-selectable table built on the existing data. "In review more than 5 days" surfaces stuck work; "Assigned to me, sorted by due date" runs the writer's day; "Posts spiked this quarter" feeds the retrospective.

None of this requires new data — only a surface that treats the existing fields as queryable columns rather than per-post details.