[pmwiki-users] Save As Draft (was Re: Preventing vandalism)

[Neil Herber]

At 2006-06-17  09:13 AM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
>When an author does "Save Draft", the edits are saved under a
>page that has "-Draft" appended to its page name.  Thus, the
>original page is left unchanged, and visitors won't see it unless
>they're explicitly looking for it.  (There's also a way to
>require a read password for -Draft pages.)
>
>Editing a page that has an unpublished draft available causes the
>-Draft copy to be loaded instead of the original.  So, one way to
>"find" the draft is to simply edit the original page -- i.e.,
>editing a page always returns the latest draft if any exists.
>
>When the "Save" (proposed "Publish" or "Save Final") button is hit
>on a -Draft page, it saves the changes to the non-Draft version of
>the page and removes the -Draft copy.

The more I think about this, the less I like it. There are several reasons.

For the group of authors I am working with, life prior to a wiki 
consisted of emailed draft versions of Word files sent to 
reviewers/co-authors. We used simple file suffixing for version 
control "d1, d2, etc." But a draft was always visible and "published" 
to the group.

With the system proposed above, co-authors  do not see the "current 
draft" version until they try to edit the page. Then, what they get 
to edit, doesn't correspond to what they saw just before pressing the 
edit button. For my group, I predict confusion all around.

What I think would work, would be a visible marker (background, 
header) on the page indicating that it was in draft state but would 
be removed when the draft was published. But we can do that now with 
a wikistyle or extra heading, which requires no additions to the core 
or extra recipes.

I do think the draft mechanism described above would be useful for 
wikis that were used as a CMS, where a small group of sophisticated 
authors are able to edit draft versions of page revisions without 
affecting the live website. It does nothing for new pages that need 
to be kept hidden until published (but a read password could do that).

I guess the point of my rambling is that this seems to be a solution 
for a very specific problem and not something that would be used on most wikis.


Neil Herber
Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/