[pmwiki-users] notice of current edit

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 04:35:03PM -0400, Radu wrote:
> Prior to opening PITS/Cookbook entries, and after searching the site and 
> the email archive with no success, here's a question:
> 
> Has anyone suggested before that when opening for edit a page that's 
> currently being edited by someone else, a notice come up saying
> * "this page is being edited since (timestamp)"...
> * admin-selectable, for sites who want it: ..." by (authorname)"

It's been discussed somewhat, but it was usually in the context of 
locking pages against further edits.

> Subsequent edits would not change the original timestamp, which would get 
> cleared only on that author saving the page, or by a new edit after a 
> configurable interval (fixed or variable with the size of the content)

Some questions: What if two authors are editing the page at the same 
time -- then when does it get cleared?  Or is it strictly a "wait 
until the first editor saves" sort of flag?

There's another important aspect to this:  in looking through pmwiki.org's
server logs recently, I've noticed that a lot of edit links get triggered
by search engines.  As a result, a lot of authors would get false
"this page is being edited since (timestamp)" messages.  What's more,
those messages don't disappear until the timeout because the search
engines typically don't save the page.

>From an implementation perspective it requires keeping track of the
edit time (and sources) somewhere.  I'd prefer not to do that in the 
page files themselves, so there'd likely need to be a scratchpad file 
maintained somewhere for this -- similar to mailposts.

Pm