[Pmwiki-users] Re: Autosave on Preview

[Christian Ridderström]

On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Steven Leite wrote:

> a) the wiki.d files aren't cluttered with more unecessary information
> that is required

Wouldn't the draft be removed from the wiki file, after it has been 
"saved"? (i.e. the clutter would only be temporary).

> b) we are talking about a temporary (draft) here
> c) someone raised a good point which I agree with, that is, the
> auto-save (preview) feature is for the purpose of saving ourselves from
> ourselves (either by forgetting to save, or experiencing a computer
> crash, or a power outage).  So the file really would be temporary (has
> no business being stored inside the wiki.d file or even the wiki.d
> directory for that matter.

Hmm.. not that temporary necessarily. If, as you say the user experiences
a crash, the draft should remain until someone discards it or saves it.
This might be a while

> d) another good point that was raised by another user was that you may
> not want people to see the "draft" copy that you are working on.

I'm starting to like the idea of a draft more and more... however I'm
primarily thinking of a draft that a group of users can access, or
everyone for that matter (simpler usage without uthentication)

* People can collaborate on a draft before "releasing it"
* Beginners who're afraid to modify a page can do the changes to a draft 
  and then ask other people on e.g. the user's list if it looks alright
* You allow voluntary "peer review"

I think these items would be great from a quality point of view, as well
as encourage people to modify pages (or rather, to suggest changes). For
instance, I can sometimes feel hesitiant to modify some of Patrick's
pmwiki pages. Now I could simply make changes in the draft, and when I'm
happy with the changes, I'll send Patrick an e-mail asking him if that
looks good to him.

So for me it now really makes sense to store the draft in the wiki page.  
For that matter, I can even imagine allowing several drafts (draft 1,
draft 2, draft 3 etc), where the different drafts might use different
outline of your text.

> > But this still begs the issue of how to deal with edits from
> > simultaneous authors between the various drafts of a page.

Do you mean simultaneous edits of a draft?  Maybe I've missed something 
here, but couldn't that be treated just like simultaneous edits of the 
"public" version of a page?

> > One could always look at the page text stored in the page as being a
> > draft, with some sort of option to flag a particular version in the
> > page history as being the "currently published version", which PmWiki
> > uses when browsing the page.  I.e., ?action=browse (default) would
> > display the version of the page that is flagged as the published one,
> > while ?action=draft would be used to see the latest edited version of
> > the page, and ?action=edit would always go from the the latest version
> > as it does now.

I think that maybe it'd be better to select the "branch" using a separate 
argument:
 * '?branch=HEAD' or '?branch=default' selects the (latest) public page
 * '?branch=draft1' selects a branch called 'draft1'. If this branch
   doesn't exist, the user is allowed to create it. He could be given
   a choice of other branches to use as a start for the page.

So in order to view a branch, you would go to:
	http://www.pmwiki.org/Some/Page?branch=draft1
and to edit it you'd go to:
	http://www.pmwiki.org/Some/Page?branch=draft1&action=edit

In the edit view, you would need a button like
	"Remove this branch and merge it into"
followed by a selector where you can choose which branch to merge it into.

I think this would be very cool, but maybe it's too much.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m                           http://www.md.kth.se/~chr