Site-wide PUBLISH should not co-exist with multiple user editors

[danielpeter]

I just added a feature "idea" related to a needed fix for a workflow related to submitting content but I'll add a summary of the issue in this section as well.

Publishing content on a site-wide, single button push basis is dangerous and potentially puts editors and even the website owner at legal risk.

If there is a single editor/administrator like one has for Wordpress, then having site-wide publishing is not an issue. Hopefully the administrator is keeping track of his/her own work and what page is in what draft state.

But Weebly has the ability to assign editorial permissions on a page-by-page basis, which is wonderful.

EXCEPT.

You don't want to offer this feature absent a page-by-page approval workflow as well.

If a second author or editor is working on a page and is half-way done with something, he won't want his page published by someone else who has access to the publish button.  But right now, it is possible that an editor can publish a half-baked page that might contain all manner of wrong info, poor formatting, improper pictures, or just an unapproved layout and no one would be the wiser until someone gets an email regarding the misspelling of the word "election" in the sentence, "Donald Trump has a huuuge election to deal with".

Did anyone preview the page before it went live? Probably not because it went live before its time.

Weebly needs to remove the "publish" button from everyone except the site owner account until it can add page-by-page publishing.  This is critical before someone loses their job for making something public that was not ready to be made public.

edited to add helpful picture 😉

[Erin6]

Hey, @danielpeter!

Thank you so much for posting your suggestion and summarizing it here. I think this is a great and helpful idea!

Thanks again,

Erin

Weebly Community Manager

[danielpeter]

@Erin, To pass along to your devs:

One "fix" to this problem that could be done is that if someone is working on a page, it is simply "checked out".

As long as a page is checked out, it won't publish along with the other pages that have been worked on and then checked back in.

In this respect, a site editor can be largely assured that when he pushes the publish button that a half-completed page somewhere on the site has not gone live.

[gofigo]

This is badly needed. Even if you decide not to implement fine-grained approval workflow, at least I should get a list of changed pages that are about to get pushed.

Maybe you get a list of changed pages with a little checkbox next to them, and you get to uncheck pages that you don't want to push yet. It is very dangerous when multiple people are editing at the same time, you don't even know if someone is in the middle of editing when you are publishing...

[casualobserver]

I really like the idea of being able to have multiple, simultaneous edits on different pages without having a universal publish button.  I also like the idea of an organizational structure of approval such that the 'chair person' can set up the website so that editors have to request approval from the 'chair person' or the 'chair person' can designate reviewer(s) to approve for specific editors before publishing is available.

[Bernadette3]

Thanks for the feedback!