Cms: Drafts workflow

Created on 3 Dec 2020 · 5Comments · Source: craftcms/cms

When opening an entry form and entering content, you will get an indication that a draft gets created.

If you carry on inputting then close the form (e.g clicking Entries in the main nav) without ever clicking Create, the draft is saved and remains accessible for further editing under Drafts.

Some users get used to this workflow and carry on working on the drafts this way, hitting Create only at the time of publishing.

However, if garbage collection happens to run on the site, those drafts will get deleted as they are seen as _unsaved drafts_ and a user would lose all content.

The purgeUnsavedDraftsDuration (docs) allow to change this behaviour but only in the sense that unsaved drafts _never_ get deleted.

We should probably document this and/or maybe notify users _inline_ (before being able to navigate away) that if not _Created_, the draft could disappear after X days (as per config).

Another option could be to change purgeUnsavedDraftsDuration to 0 by default so that the behaviour has to be manually enabled and therefore explained with authors.

authoring content administration 🤓 enhancement

Source

olivierbon

👍2

Most helpful comment

Thanks for pointing that out @olivierbon! Definitely an unexpected critical flaw in the way things worked.

Now resolved for 3.6. Details here: https://github.com/craftcms/cms/issues/5661#issuecomment-739084173

brandonkelly on 5 Dec 2020

👍2 🎉1

All 5 comments

In my opinion, the real issue isn't that authors don't understand how auto-drafts work, or that they're not aware that auto-drafts can be deleted by garbage collection. The problem is that there's currently no way to save a new entry as an actual, non-ephemeral draft – which is a common use case, especially for content editors coming over from other CMSes like WordPress.

A better way to solve this than displaying a notification/confirm dialog would be to actually have a "Save (as) draft" button for new entries (and auto-drafts that haven't been "created" yet), as suggested in #5661.