[Pmwiki-users] Re: Autosave on Preview

John Rankin john.rankin
Sun Jul 11 19:55:13 CDT 2004


On Sunday, 11 July 2004 12:10 PM, J. Meijer <commentgg at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>I too think allowing drafts and support for approval/peer review would be
>cool. I see a wiki mostly as a collaborative document solution.
>
[snip]
>I think this would be very cool, but maybe it's too much.
>
>/Christian
>
>
>
Here is a possible 'baby steps' very simple first approach.
What is the writer and reader experience?

An author edits a page and presses Preview, but doesn't Save.
We might change the Preview button to read Draft.

On normal browse viewing, the page title gains a <sup>*</sup>,
indicating that this page has a draft associated with it.
Clicking on the * shows a browse of the draft.

The Edit Page link also gains a <sup>*</sup>, indicating that
editing the page will edit the draft.

When browsing a draft, the page title loses the *, but the 
Edit Page* link keeps it. That might be a bit too subtle --
perhaps there should be a 'draft' watermark behind the page 
text.

So a regular browse view looks like:

Group                           Recent Changes
Page Name*                                 ...
                                    Edit Page*

Suppose an author creates a reference to a new page, clicks
the ?, edits the content, presses Preview and doesn't Save.

In the referring page, instead of a ? against the page name, 
we see a * -- clicking the * takes you to a browse of the
draft.

One might ask for a password before allowing someone to
view a draft, if required.

Whenever you press Save, the draft is removed, so the 
various * marks disappear.

So far, the draft is just 'a page that hasn't yet been
saved' -- we need to have a way to abandon the draft
unsaved. So I think when viewing a draft, there has to
be an Abandon Draft (no undo) link, or something similar.

I had some thoughts about how to implement this scheme and
(famous last words) I think it's pretty trivial if one
introduces a wiki.draft/ directory (as Patrick pointed out).

So this scheme doesn't give multiple drafts, but is it
sufficient as a first and minimalist attempt at the feature?
Are there any essential capabilities missing?

And yes, it would be very cool to have this capability.

-- 
JR
--
John Rankin





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