[Pmwiki-users] Autosave on Preview

[John Rankin]

On Thursday, 8 July 2004 6:05 AM, Mirko Froehlich <mfroehlich at virage.com> wrote:
>
>On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>
>> It's easy to do in PmWiki 2.0, so it'll probably be implemented there.
>> 
>> Would it be sufficient to have a "Preview and Save" button, 
>> where it saves the page but returns you to the preview/save 
>> mode rather than returning to the browse view?
>
>Glad to hear this might be on the horizon. :)
>
>"Preview and Save" would definitely help, although it does not quite solve
>my original problem. In my case I often specifically do not want to save the
>page until I'm at a decent stopping point. This is partially because I don't
>want others to see the page before it is at least rudimentarily complete and
>partially because I do not want to clutter up the version history with too
>much junk in the initial stages of writing a new page (although I could
>probably just declare it a minor edit to solve this problem).
>
>I realize that I may be overly picky here, and maybe it would be closer to
>the Wiki spirit to simply save the page even when it is still in a chaotic
>and unfinished state. Still, personally I would prefer a way of
>automatically creating a backup copy when Preview is clicked without having
>to actually save the page.

Thinking out loud: one of the questions that managers often ask is whether
it is possible to hide a page from the world until it is in some way
authorised for release. For example, there may be a formal review and 
release process for new pages.

I'm wondering if this excellent idea of an autosave might be generalised in 
a way that world+dog sees the current page (or no page if it's a new page) 
while those with special privileges see a preview of the page as it will 
look, with the special right to release it on an unsuspecting community.

I'm /not/ suggesting a full work flow control and release mechanism 
(people who need such features probably want something other than a wiki).

Here's how it might work:
- a 'Hide page' checkbox on the edit view

- a special 'edit hidden' password required to edit a hidden page

- each hidden page could even have its own password (with the ability
  for an administrator to force open a page with a lost password)

But I'm sure others can come up with a better approach...


-- 
JR
--
John Rankin