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, however that presents a mountain of usability issues.
Great. Actually, we had been talking about an extension like that just the other day, Andy (aka Expresionengineer) hinted at wanting to write a locking one, so this is a bit of a surprise… Most welcome, of course.
Great. Actually, we had been talking about an extension like that just the other day, Andy (aka Expresionengineer) hinted at wanting to write a locking one, so this is a bit of a surprise… Most welcome, of course.
Yes, actually imediately after the thread that you and I both engaged in regarding this, it had been on my to-do list. I needed to add some new extension hooks, though, as the Wiki module did not have any prior to 1.6. I do think I recall reading about Andy’s which he wrote for use in a controlled development environment, which had both locks and email notifications when resources are freed up. I think that’s pretty cool, and definitely has merit for organizations where all the users are essentially “trusted”, but particularly for wikis, and for general consumption, I felt the need to go with something that was much less strict.
the_butcher - 25 June 2007 09:00 AM
Very nice, will this be an inclusive feature in upcoming EE releases?
Not in the immediate future, no, particularly if an add-on can accomplish it. Not every feature, even the “good” ones need to be included in the application by default, as it adds bloat for users who have no use for them.
I do think I recall reading about Andy’s which he wrote for use in a controlled development environment, which had both locks and email notifications when resources are freed up.
Yes, slightly more elaborate at any rate. He told me a bit more about it via PM, but his client owns all the rights to the code, so he couldn’t simpyl release it like that.
I think that’s pretty cool, and definitely has merit for organizations where all the users are essentially “trusted”, but particularly for wikis, and for general consumption, I felt the need to go with something that was much less strict.
Yes, it’s pretty cool that the wiki’s included. And in almost all cases, a warning will do nicely.
Not in the immediate future, no, particularly if an add-on can accomplish it. Not every feature, even the “good” ones need to be included in the application by default, as it adds bloat for users who have no use for them.
Whilst I do indeed fully agree with your statement, what I find surprising then is that the trackback module comes installed and active with every EE install. My intention isn’t to start a debate over what is and isn’t useful, but how one perceives what is and isn’t useful.
Don’t get me started on trackbacks, the_butcher. I personally despise the things and wish they would Dodo. At the time they were originally incorporated into EE they were much more widely used, and there were many bloggers using pMachine Pro that expected this functionality out of the box and ready to go when transitioning to EE, so I’m sure that affected the decision to have it included and enabled by default.
I installed this extension and it is really a nice addition - epecially now that I have some hired help and we are occasionally both working in the control panel at the same time. Thanks!
not to discredit this great extension but I’m personally a fan of “locking” out other users IF the lock requires ACTIVITY on the edit page. I get that often when I do online banking, where the session ends if no activity has been detected within 20 min.
The Edit Alert extension could be used as a stepping stone to such an extension that actually locked out areas, but for reasons I explain in the blog entry, it’s not something I have a personal interest in developing, and isn’t likely to make it into the base application for similar reasons.
I am wondering, will this extension work with a stand alone edit form for the weblog module rather than the wiki? So that a message is displayed within the front end entry edit page itself when the article is being edited, either through the CP or the stand alone edit form? I have a wiki style site but am not using the wiki module because of its custom field limitations.
Thx!
