[pmwiki-users] Save As Draft (was Re: Preventing vandalism)

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 11:16:02PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> At 2006-06-17  09:13 AM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
> >When an author does "Save Draft", the edits are saved under a
> >page that has "-Draft" appended to its page name.  
> >
> >Editing a page that has an unpublished draft available causes the
> >-Draft copy to be loaded instead of the original.  
> >"find" the draft is to simply edit the original page -- i.e.,
> >editing a page always returns the latest draft if any exists.
> >
> >When the "Save" (proposed "Publish" or "Save Final") button is hit
> >on a -Draft page, it saves the changes to the non-Draft version of
> >the page and removes the -Draft copy.
> 
> With the system proposed above, co-authors  do not see the "current 
> draft" version until they try to edit the page. 

But they can -- all they have to do is view the -Draft version
of the page instead of the published version.  And it's
easy enough to provide a "view current draft" link whenever
the -Draft page exists.

> What I think would work, would be a visible marker (background, 
> header) on the page indicating that it was in draft state but would 
> be removed when the draft was published. But we can do that now with 
> a wikistyle or extra heading, which requires no additions to the core 
> or extra recipes.

Actually, the system already provides this in the heading --
when editing a draft version of a page the "-Draft" appears
in the heading above the edit form.  Of course, a site admin
can also change the background color or do other special
stylings based on the pagename if the "-Draft" isn't enough
of a marker.

> I do think the draft mechanism described above would be useful for 
> wikis that were used as a CMS, where a small group of sophisticated 
> authors are able to edit draft versions of page revisions without 
> affecting the live website. It does nothing for new pages that need 
> to be kept hidden until published (but a read password could do that).

Sure it does -- a new page can be saved as a draft (and hidden)
until it's ready to be published.  The page doesn't have to
exist in order to be saved as a draft.

(And the use of the word "publish" in the above makes me think
that the buttons should indeed be called "Save as Draft" and "Publish".)

> I guess the point of my rambling is that this seems to be a solution 
> for a very specific problem and not something that would be used on most 
> wikis.

I agree it's not used on many wikis -- still, the feature is there
for those that want to use it, and afaict it's flexible enough to
work in the various ways a site administrator would want it to work.

Pm