We need a way to change the authors of a page. Right now, if we want to change the content author we need to make a change to the content and save it. That’s far from ideal…
So I can see 3 options:
Provide a “Change Author” action in the More Actions menu in pages
Provide a button next to “Last modified by …” to change the authors (it could open a popup asking the new author and the type of author being changed - content author, metadata author, etc)
List the authors in the Info extradoc tab (Loading...) and allow to change them inline
For all 3 options, we should restrict the display/action to advanced users IMO.
I think I prefer option 3). There’s the question of deciding when we have too much information displayed in that tab. There’s an issue to have a new tab to display computed rights, see Loading... In the future, we could imagine moving everything related to rights in a new Rights tab, including the various authors.
It shouldn’t be possible for users without programming rights to change authors that we use for right checks to any other value than their own user. And even for the displayed author, I think that’s a bad idea.
I think what would be good is that when a page’s author is missing a required right that is enforced on a page, we could offer a button to re-save the page with the current user as author if the current user has the missing right. In this case, I would even display a warning on top of the page that offers this action similar to the warning that we display when a required right is missing. That’s also very similar to what’s suggested in XWIKI-444 (see the attached screenshots).
I’m not really against option 3, like displaying the authors for advanced users and having a button to re-save the page as current user (or for users with programming right, an option to select a user), but I’m not sure if we would really need it if we implemented the option I mentioned before which has the advantage that it would only show something if there is really something to do.
Do you intend this feature to work only to set the current user as an author or something more generic? Change author to any user probably requires programming rights if that’s even something we allow ?
+1 for option 3, it feels like the more modern approach (no page reload!) and we can definitely leverage more this UI zone to contain technical information/use cases. We need to make sure the different kind of authors are clearly explained with maybe a link to more in-depth explanations.
-1 for option 2, I feel like it would be clutter for most of the common use cases. I.e. you see this button while doing anything and rarely ever use it.
The problem I see is that the Required rights (adding a button in the warning or a page missing a required right) use case doesn’t cater for all use cases. First, my understanding is that the Required Rights feature is far from being exhaustive (ie it’s not finding all cases). Second, a user may need to change the author for some other reason (whatever they are, and not specifically related to rights).
So for me we should do what you propose but we should also add a way to change the authors in the UI.