Occupied!
Particularly when working with wikis, it can be frustrating when you have many users unknowingly working on resources simultaneously, and one person’s edits effectively cancel out the others’ when they submit their changes. Popular articles on busy sites can go through spurts where this happens regularly. There are a few wikis that I casually participate in that I see this happen quite a bit.
The kneejerk solution is to “lock” an article when one person begins editing, disallowing others from working on the same resource. However that presents a mountain of usability issues. For instance, one malicious user could continue editing an article making their vandalism last for hours or even days, locking out other editors from being able to correct it. Vandalism aside, how about a user who opens an article, gets distracted, and just leaves their browser window open? Now imagine multiple people in tandem doing either of the above, either accidentally or intentionally? Ugh. So I’m not a fan of the concept of actual locks. I am, however, a fan of giving people all the information they need to make good decisions.
So I release to you today, Edit Alert 1.0, an extension that will let a user know when someone else is already editing a resource that they want to edit. It requires ExpressionEngine 1.6, and works with weblog entries, templates, and perhaps most importantly, wiki articles, where this is a much more frequent issue. Nothing is locked: you are simply alerted to the fact that someone else is editing the resource. It’s up to the user what they want to do at that point. The time it takes for an alert to ‘expire’ is configurable, as is the CSS for the alert itself. See the included readme file for installation instructions.
