Thread

Hey!

Just wanted to share a few ideas and ask a few questions concerning the ability to save a post as a draft (i.e. to save it without publishing it).

Why is this not implemented in EE already? It is such a basic tool, and shouldn’t be that difficult to code and to get working, that you’d imagine someone else already had thought of it.
To be honest, the draft-feature is one of the major aspects of WordPress that keep me from feeling 100% well with using EE. The fact that there is only one extension/plug-in made to solve this (costing as much as $150) and that it seemingly hasn’t been brought to attention by anyone else on the forums makes me wonder whether I am the only blogger on earth using EE 😊 !

Please, tell me I am not the only one actively looking for a feature like this - the countless times I’ve been forced to leave my half-written post and copy-paste it to notepad and wished I could have saved it in EE itself…

If there is something very obvious I have missed out, please enlighten me - as I haven’t followed EE’s development as much during the past few months maybe there has been development in the blogging-aspects that have gone unseen to me!

EDIT: Yes, I am aware of the Open/Closed status on posts. But if I publish in a Closed state, and then switch to Open, will this ping my services anyway? Is there any difference to Publishing a final post?

I’ve had some success using EE’s Custom Status fields to create more realistic editorial workflows. Beyond “Open” and “Closed,” it’s trivial to add a default status of “Draft.”

The downside is that as soon as you assign a status other than Open or Closed, EE wants a status=”” parameter in tags that call that content or they will display nothing, so you might have to review all your existing templates to implement this.

The upside is that you can enforce which entry statuses (“Open” or “Published” or whatever you call your Good-to-Go state) will generate notifications.

Regarding the extension you mentioned, you may be talking about the one that implements a much more complex, multi-user editorial workflow, where edit locks and other file integrity practices need to be enforced in the CP. Typical bloggers work alone and have little need for all that check-in/check-out overhead.

If you eliminated that requirement, it should be trivial to create a non-public/non-pinging EE template that displays only entries with a status of “Draft” (along with EditThis links for each entry) so you can see work-in-progress as they will appear in the live site.

I’m not sure what you are trying to achieve re:pings, but check out the postponed addon.