Saving changes without publishing

[jasongarber]

I’m wanting to see if people have a method of doing the following using
existing features or if I need to write an extension:

‘Draft’ pages don’t appear on the public site but ‘Published’ ones do.
Is
there a way to keep a page published but work on (and save) a draft of
changes? That is, if you’re making big changes to a page and want to
save
those changes, but aren’t ready to show the world yet, how do you handle
that?

I imagine it wouldn’t be hard to work up an extension that uses
acts_as_draftable on Page. Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing
something obvious.

Jason

[jasongarber]

On 4/29/07, Jason G. [email protected] wrote:

That is, if you’re making big changes to a page and want to save those
changes, but aren’t ready to show the world yet, how do you handle that?

I use my preferred text editor and the filesystem. It doesn’t happen
often,
though … When I make changes to content I do it because I want
people to
see it.

acts_as_draftable? Never knew of it.

[jasongarber]

Mislav Marohni�? wrote:

acts_as_draftable? Never knew of it.

Me neither. Apparently there is an acts_as_versioned by the same author
and both look pretty cool.

Not sure what the difference is but googling turned up some interesting
write-ups. Anyone know how well/if radiant would take to this?

Even better, anyone interested in crafting an extension to add
versioning functionality to radiant?

-Chris

[jasongarber]

On 4/29/07, Chris P. [email protected] wrote:

acts_as_draftable? Never knew of it.

Me neither. Apparently there is an acts_as_versioned by the same author
and both look pretty cool.

That must be Rick O… The latter plugin is well-known.

Even better, anyone interested in crafting an extension to add

versioning functionality to radiant?

Would be cool, but doesn’t solve the original poster’s problem.

[jasongarber]

I’ll probably be working on a Radiant project in the next few months
that needs this functionality. Hopefully it can be pushed upstream into
the core or an extension. In the meantime, I’ll look at those plugins
and see if they’ll work.

Sean

[jasongarber]

Even better, anyone interested in crafting an extension to add

versioning functionality to radiant?

I want this too, but probably won’t get to it for a month. Hoping
someone
beats me to it.

Drafting and versioning are independent features and should probably be
implemented separately. I hate the CMSes that let 100 users have 50
versions of the same page (all 5000 in conflict, no doubt) and that let
you
make any historical version live. Who does that? No, what we need is
ONE
draft version (which is how acts_as_draftable works) and the ability to
“undo” (rollback the latest version). That will meet 90% of people’s
needs
without adding too much complexity.

When I make changes to content I do it because I want people to

see it.

Me too, but usually there are a couple iterations before I get it right.
Either my Textile didn’t render right or I forgot to float an image or
something. I usually find myself working with Radiant in one window and
the
site in another (to make sure it looks OK), hoping no users hit the page
while it’s in limbo.

[jasongarber]

Both plugins are by Rick O.:
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/acts_as_draftable
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/acts_as_versioned

Jason G. wrote:

…what we need is ONE draft version (which is how
acts_as_draftable works) and the ability to “undo” (rollback
the latest version). That will meet 90% of people’s needs
without adding too much complexity.

That sound’s likely.

However, the other common versioning “need” would be something similar
to subversion’s tagging so clients could mark the current version of the
site and revert back it if needed.

-Chris

[jasongarber]

On 4/29/07, Jason G. [email protected] wrote:

Drafting and versioning are independent features and should probably be
implemented separately. No, what we need is ONE
draft version (which is how acts_as_draftable works) and the ability to
“undo” (rollback the latest version). That will meet 90% of people’s needs
without adding too much complexity.

This is definitely the way to do it. We learned this the hard way with
our project (sorry, not in Radiant so nothing to share). More then one
“draft” confuses people and almost no one rollbacks very far if at
all. Anything more (e.g. a snapshot) sounds nice but you’ll just add a
level of complexity that not’s worth maintaining going forward.

–

Proud supporter of DC United

[jasongarber]

Hello all again!

I had posted an email previously, both a thanks and a
suggestion/question on availability. I’m kind of curious, just for the
near future.

On a sidenote, I’ve started having a need for delayed postings (IE:-
show up at a specific time, including a page cache clear.) and wondering
if there is either a plan to incorporate it soon or if someone out there
is working on an extension to do similar to it. I figured that it’d be
fairly simple through use of the published_at attribute by simply
looking for the date; if it is before the date, it is excluded, if not,
it’s included; And then add a simple drop-down box on it. A modification
to r:children:each for a tag such as delayed=“false” – Set it up so it
defaults to true but allow website developers to turn it off for
whatever reasons.

Hope someone could give me some insight It’d be greatly appreciated!

Andrew K.

[jasongarber]

Dave O. wrote:

Anything more (e.g. a snapshot) sounds nice but you’ll just add
a level of complexity that not worth maintaining going forward.

Come to think of it, once import/export is fully functional, if my
clients could backup their site using export and recover with import,
the whole rollback thing becomes kinda unnecessary.

-Chris