Wikidot Dev Site

Hi,

yes, we want to implement such functionality in WD2 and this could be done in at least 2 ways (btw: now it is a good time to discuss which is better):

1. Draft/unpublished mode

One could edit pages and save without publishing. This would mean that a page (or whole wiki) could have 2 versions: current and published. This would add extra structures to the site and myself I am not a big fan of this solution because I find it lacking flexibility.

2. Cloning & merging back

To keep a page/category/wiki in a consistent state one does not edit live pages, but instead "clones" a page/category/wiki and makes changes to the working copy. When changes are done (and reviewed), they can be merged back to the original source. Since the clone operation links the original and cloned content, merging back should be easy and straightforward.

The solution 2 is inspired by how distributed version control systems work (e.g. Mercurial or Baazar). If we can implement a nice merge tool, several people could easily work on the same document (different copies) and push the changes back to the original container.

IMHO it gives nice flexibility and could be adapted in various workflows. The clone-edit-review-publish would nicely work with the permission system.

We are not really planning this for the "alpha release" of WD2 (in the next few months) but this is a must eventually. Michal Bartoszewski (e1n) is working on adapting a 3-way XML merge tool (I think this one) to this scenario but any help from XML experts would be highly appreciated.

best,
Michal