[pmwiki-users] stable article versions

[Stirling Westrup]

Florian Fischer wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> i´m using pmwiki for developing some kind of encyclopedia. Since it
> is used for a university we will have to establish some kind of
> quality-management. We are planning to introduce some kind of stable
> article versions. I know this can be easiliy done by setting an edit
> password. It would be great ot offer a user the opportunity to
> propose changes of an edit protected page without affecting the
> article itself. Only if the admin prooves this article the originally
> edit protected article can be changed. Does anybody have an idea of
> how to establish such a system?
> 
There is a (currently) little-documented feature in PmWiki called Drafts
which allows for this. You must set $EnableDrafts=1; in your
local/config.php page to activate the feature. From then on the page
editing controls grow some extra buttons so that a draft version of a
page can be saved (with a distinguished name -- usually by adding
'-Draft' to the end of the page name, but its configurable), further
edited and later published with a 'publish' button that updates the
official version of the page.

It should, in principal, be easy to add some lines to the config.php
file which modifies the look of the buttons and what authorization
conditions they appear under. The intent would be that users with normal
edit privileges would only have access to the buttons that create new
draft versions of pages, and that the moderators would be informed
whenever that happened. The moderators would have access to the
'Publish' buttons and could turn a draft into a final article.

The reason this is currently (mostly) undocumented is that we're still
debating the exact wording on the buttons under different conditions,
what the various use-cases for the Drafts feature would be, and what the
most common configurations are likely to be.

As far as I know, no one is yet using the Drafts feature in the way
described above, so you would be breaking new ground if you went this
way, but there would be active assistance from the list in getting it
working. I, for one, volunteer to help out if needed, as I have plans
for implementing a couple of administrative websites of my own that
could make good use of this.