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
