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

Scott Connard connard at dsg-inc.com
Mon Jun 19 06:05:10 CDT 2006


> 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 Editing a page that has an unpublished draft available causes the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/
>

Neil,

My solution to the confusion is to place the following in the  
GroupHeader:

(:if exists {$FullName}-Draft:)
%red%[[{$FullName}-Draft]] exists%%

(:ifend:)

This will allow users to know that there is a Draft page and view it  
if they want to.  They will also not be surprised if the page they  
edit is different from the official page.

Scott Connard.





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