[Pmwiki-users] Re: Autosave on Preview

[J. Meijer]

I too think allowing drafts and support for approval/peer review would be
cool. I see a wiki mostly as a collaborative document solution.

To me drafts are an application of hierarchies: drafts might reside below
the page being edited. In the Profiles/Author/Drafts a list of open drafts
could be listed.

Christian, did you get on with the syntax (on trees) or did I miss it? Or
did the impulse time-out? :-)

jan



----Original Message----
From: Christian Ridderstr?m <chr at home.se>
Subject: [Pmwiki-users] Re: Autosave on Preview

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.

> > 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