Best approach for users to create personal drafts?

I’ve been reading up on the Publication Workflow Extension and am curious if this is the only way for users to create a draft?

We have many users (particularly admin) who draft pages before they share them with a broader group / publish on the wiki. In these instances, it’s not necessary to have the ‘moderator’ and ‘contributor’ stages of the workflow; it would be more of a personal draft. Ideally the user could access their own drafts from their profile, or at the very least, only be able to see drafts where they are the author in the draft space.

Is something like this a possibility with this application?

Thanks! :slightly_smiling_face:

Hi,

you might be interested to check the Change Request Extension: https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Application%20Change%20Request%20-%20UI/

The extension allows you to submit changes for review before they’re published, but you can configure it to allow people to publish the changes by themselves. It might be a bit overkill for your need to be honest, as Change Request supports many features. But it does allow to draft changes for new pages before they are published, and it allows to find back all your drafts from your profile.

I won’t answer the question about the Publication Workflow Extension as I don’t know enough about this extension, so maybe it allows to do what you need and it’s lighter than Change Request. I’ll let @lucaa answer on that.

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Hello @jgilmore ,

The publication workflow application is more tailored towards a collaborative work on drafts and their publishing; a group of people would have access to drafts and collaboratively write them, and then the publication process is a tighter process held by rights, in order to make sure that what gets published has been validated by the users specifically designated as having the right to validate.

Thus, as you noticed, the publication workflow application may be a little overkill for your need.

What you could do, in your case, is just have page tree for each user with explicit rights given only to those users, where they’d store their draft pages and, as soon as they’re ready, move them to the final place in the wiki’s “public” page tree. It’s not an application per se, it’s more of a way of organizing the information that could answer your need.

The whole idea of drafting things is a little bit anti-collaboration, which is why you may not find it as a first class citizen in XWiki: it’s anti-collaboration aspect is the fact that it’s not “share first”, in order for an information to be accessible to everyone it needs to go through a sharing step. If this step is missed, the information may lay there without users being able to use it, in a “private space” of whoever knows it.

Enjoy XWiki,
Anca

Thank you @surli and @lucaa. We’ll look into each of these avenues and determine what makes the most sense for our user community.

Have a great day :slightly_smiling_face:

The whole idea of drafting things is a little bit anti-collaboration, which is why you may not find it as a first

class citizen in XWiki: it’s anti-collaboration aspect is the fact that it’s not “share first”, in order for an information to be accessible to everyone it needs to go through a sharing step. If this step is missed, the information may lay there without users being able to use it, in a “private space” of whoever knows it.

As it should be :smiley:
I don´t like the collaboration aspect of Wikis. I like it over traditional DMS because of how easy is to link different pages, create backlinks, write directly on pages instead of Word which is then rendered as PDF, etc, etc.