[pmwiki-users] Request for ideas -- edit page improvements

[Patrick R. Michaud]

Over the past months, there have been a lot of very good ideas
and suggestions for improving the functioning of the edit page.
Thus far I haven't incorporated many of them into the distribution,
mainly because it seemed like this was an area where "hacking" them
in without a larger design framework was going to cause us long-term
compatibility and support problems.

However, now may be a good time to revisit the edit page design and
come up with a more robust system.  In order to do that it would be
very helpful for me to have the various proposals and ideas collected 
within a single thread or page -- thus this message.

Here are some of the ideas and suggestions I've heard come across
the listserv over the past many months:

   - provide a "change summary" field
   - initially populate the textarea field with an "edit template"
   - eliminate the "Reset" button, or make it do something different
   - a "Save minor edit" button instead of the "This is a minor edit"
     box
   - add a "Save and re-edit" button to save changes but immediately continue
     editing
   - add capability to edit drafts of a page before publishing them
   - an "add new page" link or way to prompt for a page's name

And, some things which have been suggested in the past but I'm going
to exclude from consideration for now, if only because I think they're 
too distracting, difficult, or impossible within current browsing 
environments:

   - full WYSIWYG editing
   - drag-and-drop insertion of attachments or images

I'm not looking for a radical restructuring of PmWiki or the way 
it manages page edits; just to redesign things enough to support some
oft-requested features.

So, if you have things you want to see included, or comments strongly 
in favor of (or opposed) to any of the above features, now might be a 
good time to make them known.  :-)

Pm