I would like to know if there is a way to set-up a tracking of documents or articles submitted to us but they are not uploaded to the website yet. Our authors would want to see the status of their articles. From the time the articles are submitted they go through several stages such as being reviewed, then returned to them for improvement, then review, accepted, edited, layouting, proofing, correcting, then published. Can we do this in XOOPS wherein we enter these info and the authors can check the status of their manuscripts regularly until published?

I don't know if a module with such capabilities exists.
In News you can let people submit, and others approve, and there is a notification at publishing, but that is all.
There is also a DMS (Document managment system) module, but I believe it is more about downloading documents.

With a local server as XAMPP, you can try and check out every module you want on your local PC.

There could be two ways of doing it by using existing modules:

1) Use something like News, where you define categories (e.g. Submitted, In Review, Returned to Author, Accepted, etc). The author submits an article, and the Admin/moderator can change the status by moving the article to another category.

Authors would have special rights to see the status (e.g. Category) of their acticles

2) Another approach would be to use a Bug Tracking modules (e.g. xHelp), where you can assign categories, and then track the article similarly to how you would track a Bug, by assigning it to a new category.

thanks i will try these and see which ones can be used