Warn if a page being edited is in draft mode by someone else
Asked by Jonas Edlund:

Someone edits a page, saves it and choose not to publish it. Then when someone else tries to edit the same page, it would be very usefull to get a message that the page is in draftmode by someone else and that the page can't be edited until that person decides to publish or cancel the draft.

It would be even nicer if a mail is sent to the other person with a link to the page and a message that user want's to edit the page.

An administrator can select to publish or cancel the draft made by others.


Answers:
author: Darryl Duke
body: Hi Jonas,

Zen version 5.2.4 has this feature in it. When editing a page, you see other users that have active drafts on the page (or are editing the page).

Thanks again!


author: Jonas Edlund
body: Hi Darryl,

now we have deployed version 5.4.2 and the new feature works fine.

Thank You for very good support and quick feedback.

comments: author: Darryl Duke
body: Thanks for the update, and for the kind words. Glad to have been helpful!


author: Darryl Duke
body: Hi Jonas,

Having improved notifications for editors of a page with drafts is on our features request list.

Thanks!


author: Jason Wandel
body: Hi Jonas,

I would have thought that if someone saves a page they are editting but then chooses not to publish those changes, they have likely obliterated the reason for their save. The only reason I can think of for this kind of behaviour is if the person is massively modifying the content/structure/whatever of that page - and I think if this is going to happen I'd be more inclined to create a new page, and once completed delete the old and re-direct any links (or alternately, get the new content working on a new page, but then simply copy the content over the existing page so the entire change is atomic).

IIRC all the wiki systems I have dealt with have an edit lock, but the lock times out if you don't publish the changes - typically the lock is extended through requesting a preview or some such manual process. This timeout stops someone from editting a page then going on a long holiday and blocking others from doing anything more with the page ;-) .

Personally, I'm in favour of if you want to edit a page that has a lock, you go and talk with the person or e-mail them yourself. Most times I've had to do this, I've found the lock has been rescinded on the page (almost always by the changes being published) but the system not having caught up to that yet. Having it auto-send a mail is inviting spam IMHO - and if the person has gone away, having it auto-send a mail is a pointless exercise anyway!

My 2c worth,

Jason Wandel \[SolveIT Software\]

comments: author: Jonas Edlund
body: Thanks for the answer.

The actual reason for my question is a page where our employees add information about when they would have their summer vaccation. So it's a page that is edited by many people and some of them forgets to publish and then others add info about their vaccation and then one of the persons that forgott to publish, remember this and publish his changes and overwrites all others changes... :(

There are a function that warns if someone else currently is editing the page (or has edit it reasently), but this function will not warn if the page has been saved in draft mode by someone else.

Is there a way to actually lock a page from beeing edited by someone else as long as the page is edited or in draft mode and inform who has locked it? No need for mailing this automatically.

Regards

Jonas


author: Jason Wandel
body: OK, your request makes a bit more sense :-) . One alternative would be to have someone watch that page as per <https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Watching+Changes> so that whenever an update occurs that person is e-mailed and they can check that others' data hasn't been overwritten.

But anyway, if I was setting this up, I'd use a form that would be filled in, and the submit button updates a database which then updates the page - there is no way with this setup you'd have that problem. I've just done a google search on "confluence web forms" and the results show up that there are some plugins that seem to do something like this, and a few other sites seem to suggest other ways to solve it, too. (BTW, I've not done that kind of thing in Confluence, but have on a site I built with PHP)

HTH!

Jason Wandel \[SolveIT Software\]


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