Daniel Carrera wrote:
Pui Lam Wong wrote:
1)
How do I enforce a rule so that when I'm the owner of a page, others
can submit changes to the page, but must get my "review" before the
new version is actually published.
We haven't made an effort to enforce this. If it becomes a problem, we
can change things. It would be more complicated from the
administration point of view, so I think it's better to wait until an
actual need arises. The people who join OOoAuthors are very nice and
will follow guidelines purely out of respect.
I think we currently have things set up so that only users with the
"manager" or "owner" role can "publish" an item (Daniel, correct me if
I'm wrong). A user automatically has the "owner" role for anything that
user creates (until they transfer ownership, which rarely/never
happens). You can't really avoid allowing "managers" to publish things,
because they are effectively "superusers" within Plone. However, they
are expected to be responsible people who do things only for good
reasons (though, being human, they may screw up sometimes).
2)
If two person with "author" permission is editing the page together,
and when one person submit right before the other one do his
submittion, the data that is processed first would be replaced by the
copy before.
Is there anyway to prevent this by enforcing "review" rule so that if
more than one person is editing the page, the owner can look at
(review) these two person's submission and do a manual merge (or
something like that) before finalising the page?
This is a wiki-ish feature. Plone has a wiki built-in which might have
this feature built in. I've never tried to do this though.
I've used the Plone wiki, but I don't think it has the kind of review
and merge feature Pui Lam Wong described. One feature that the Plone
wiki *does* have, which normal Plone pages don't have, is a "history"
that lets you view the differences between versions of a page; so you
could, in theory, manually merge multiple conflicting versions of a
page. However, the wiki *doesn't* have the same "publish" notion as the
rest of Plone -- being a wiki, everything is immediately published. So,
the bottom line answer to the original question is "no".
For OOo documentation chapters, we work around this by having a
convention that each person saves any chapter that they edit as a new
file with a new name, with their initials and the date appended to the
original filename. The owner of the original file then merges those
changes into the original file. For Plone content pages (as opposed to
OOo guide chapters), there are usually few enough people changing them,
and changing them infrequently enough, that we haven't had to worry
about near-simultaneous updates.
3)
What permission does an "author" has? What's the difference between
author and owner? Since it seems like author is a role added by the
oooauthors group, I want to know a little about the permission setup
of this role.
An author has permissions to edit/add/delete files and folders. In
this sense there is no real difference with "owner" and I think we
should do away with the "owner" role altogether. It just makes
administration more complicated.
Earlier on we tried having local roles, where someone would be an
author in one folder but not in another. But administration became
very very difficult. So I started moving all the folders to the new
system we use today. The current system is simpler, and less prone to
breaking.
The "owner" role is built into Plone. As I mentioned above, you have the
"owner" role for any item you create. If you only have the "member"
role, you can only create things in your home folder (and you will be
"owner" of them -- you can have more than one role for a given item). If
you have the "author" role, you can create (and be "owner" of) things in
the "public" areas of the site. An "author" can also edit or delete
items created by another person in the public area.
We use the "author" role instead of just letting normal "members" change
the public areas, in order to require a bit more accountability. Someone
can create a login and become a member without anybody else knowing
about it, but they have to announce themselves in order to get the
author role. Hopefully, people will only do that if they really intend
to contribute constructively.
--
Janet Swisher --- Senior Technical Writer
Enthought, Inc. http://www.enthought.com
