Janet M. Swisher wrote:
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).
I am far from a Plone expert, but what you just said sounds right. There is also a 'reviewer' role around for publishing, but we have never attempted to use it. So it may not be configured for this.
I find Plone workflows very complicated. I think it's easier to rely on social convention for this sort of thing than on the software.
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".
Thanks Janet. I didn't know anything about Plone's wikis.
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.
In addition, this convention means that even if there are two simultaneous updates, they will have different file names (unless the two people also have the same initials :) ).
The review process also ensures that at any one time there is only one person working on a file. This really gets around the problem of simultaneous edits. Yet another example where social organization beats technology :)
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.
/daniel nods Cheers, Daniel. -- "It's like a rainbow. Without an observer at a 23 degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a 23 degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space between rock and mind." - Zoya Boone, Red Mars
