Drafts for published pages#152

Being able to update the content of published pages without actually publishing those changes.

In the use cases below i’m specifically talking about published pages/content.

Some use cases:

• Editor changes content and wants to save but not publish (yet).
• Editor changes content, reviewer needs to review before pubishing.
• Reviewer found some issues and saves those, both reviewer and editor can than publish.

Use cases above will go hand in hand with permission settings but i hope people understand what i mean. In short i would call it ‘drafts for published pages’.

Current work around:

• Shadow content, in other words; copies of everything in non-listed sections.
• Duplicating only those pages that need to be worked on.

Want me to elaborate even more? Let me know.

Helpful would be a kind of page status beside listed, unlisted and drafts. Drafts is actually something different than listed and unlisted. Are drafts not unlisted as well ? :-)
Possible values could be draft,in review,ready to translate,ready to release,locked and maybe some others (a kind of publishing workflow). It also would be a big thing for different language versions. Currently a page cannot be a draft in english and listed in german, which is very bad when viewed from a workflow or translation perspective (see my suggestion: https://kirby.nolt.io/150). But I guess it is a bigger effort in kirby, right?

Imho the team has to decide if this is a major feature for the core or if you could do this probably with a plugin. As far as I see there is no workflow Kirby plugin outside doing this. I would definitely make use of it if there is something. As soon as you work with several people on a page this is indispensable.

I think we’re both on the same page, though your approach is very detailed and I would say that it could all be done with one extra status (and then maybe call it what you want in the panel, which is doable for us in blueprints).

It is definitely up to the team, and I share your thought on whether this should be a core feature or a plug-in. I do however think this could be a killer feature, especially combined with revisions (https://kirby.nolt.io/135).

As drafts are stored in a separate _drafts folder, it would be possible to have independent drafts for any pages that are already published (listed or unlisted). We are thinking about this since the release of Kirby 3, but so far we didn’t find the time for it.

Yes! This is such a big deal for clients who want to be able to preview and save their edits before publishing.

Also related to my post here about wanting to be able to preview edits to published posts: https://kirby.nolt.io/314

Not sure whether this is the right place to make suggestions or bring up own ideas but I had the thought of a “preview mode” in the CMS. Since the content is typically stored in files you would specify a preview directory/URL in the configuration and whenever you edit a page you’d have the option to either see/edit the live content or switch to “preview mode” where you see and can edit all the unpublished content. If you save a page in preview mode, the files in the preview directory will be updated and can be viewed on the preview URL. And in preview mode you’d have a way of copying the changes to the live page and then save that page in “live mode” for official publishing.

Does that sound feasible?