For our current radiant app, my client is asking for this functionality: "i'd like to use our current setup of radiant and add a selection under "status" called staging. When the staging status is selected, we'd have an area we can check the page to make sure it looks and that the links work. Then we can change status to published and it would be available on the live site. The problem we're going to run into is that there are more and more people updating content who have very little html knowledge."
So, after doing a little investigating, I wrote up this proposal for how I would like to solve this problem: "In the Admin section, under the Pages tab, each page name in the tree would have a link next to the name called "draft" if a draft version exists. Clicking on the draft version would allow you to edit it and also set it's status to "Published". If you did this, it would overwrite the "Published" version. You could also delete the draft version. You could also click on the page name itself, whereby you could edit and delete the published version. If there was only a draft version of the page, then only the page name would show up and clicking on the page name would take you to the draft version. Here is an example of what it would look like: Products draft Resources In this example, the Products page has both a published version and a draft version. The Resources page only has one version. To preview the draft version of a page, you will be able to go to http://dev.location_of_radiant_app which will be a version of the site that shows draft pages if they exist, otherwise it shows the published page. Technically, this will be accomplished by creating a new radiant extension. The extension will provide for a new table called "redrafts" (and a "redrafts_parts" table). The redrafts table will mirror the structure of the pages table. When a user creates a new page, it will be added to the pages table with a status of draft. This will be the page that the user edits when he clicks on the page name link on the Pages page. Once the page is ready to publish, the user changes it's status to "Published". Now, let's say the user wants to edit the page. We need to create a new draft of the page, but we need to keep the current published version for production. So, when the user goes to the edit screen for the published page, they will be able to edit the page and then click a button called "Save as draft". This will make a copy of the edited page and save it to the redrafts table. Now, the page will have both a drafts link and a link to the published page. Once they are ready to publish the new draft, they will be able to go to the edit screen of the drafted page, change the status to "Published" and save it. This will overwrite the current published page in the pages table with the draft page from the redrafts table and delete the copy from the redrafts page. Likewise, if you were to delete the published version of a page that also had a draft version. The draft version would automatically be moved from the redrafts table to the pages table, but would still have a status of "drafted". In other words, whenever only one version of a page exists, it must be in the pages table. The redrafts table will only hold draft versions of pages that currently have a published version. My plan is to use the Shards extension (which, actually, has been incorporated into radiant core in version 0.6.7) to manipulate the admin ui to present the "draft" links and the new buttons on the page edit screen. To add the back-end model functionality, I will add a redrafts migration and also callback methods in the Page model. To add the controller functionality, I will need to override some of the instance methods of the Pages controller." My thinking for having the extension work this way is that it will be as unobtrusive to the current functionality as possible, i.e. if a user never needs to create a new draft of an existing page, then the extension won't come into play and things will function as if this extension does not exist. My question for this mailing list is, does my proposed extension sound do-able? Is there an easier/better way for me to accomplish this? Anything I missed? Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Jamey Cribbs _______________________________________________ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
