Record lifecycle: the states a record moves through — Opt in, one table at a time

A lifecycle is added from the Lifecycle tab beside the field editor, the same place posting rules live — and it starts from the status field the table already has. The field's own options become the stages, listed with live record counts and a guessed meaning each; nothing is added to the dropdown, nothing is renamed, and no record changes. A sensible starting set of moves is generated from the meanings (step forward or back, cancel from anywhere, finish from the last stage, reopen after a failure), and every one of them is an editable checkbox afterwards. Templates exist only for a table with no usable status field: they fill an empty Select — or add a fresh Status field for you — with their own stages. A field that already has options is never templated, so a template can't bolt its vocabulary onto a dropdown people already use. Tables without a lifecycle behave exactly as they always have. Switching one off later keeps history legible rather than erasing it: past entries still name the states they moved through, because history references states by name. The two look alike and answer different questions: where a record is in its life, against who still has to say yes.