Document management

Wikis are a part of d-works, the product I am currently building. The most essential features of a Wiki besides the easy linking of pages: preventing two users working on the same document at the same time and document versioning. So these are my challenges for the next few days.

Check in/check out

When someone starts editing a page, this page is marked as locked. When a user opens a WikiPage that is already being edited by someone, he should have a message 'locked by [user] on [date] instead of the normal Edit action. Apart from that, users should have an overview of the pages he has checked out and Admin should have an overview of all these checked out pages. On save, the page could be automatically checked back in. However, it would make more sense to add the possibility to save and continue editing. But this implements that a separate draft version is saved: while editing, other users see the latest checked in version and not the draft. There should also be the possibility of manually checking back in documents.

Versioning

Whenever a WikiPage is saved, it automatically becomes a new version. All previous versions are stored. On save, the user gets the possibility to add a comment. Users can get a list of versions, compare two of them and do a rollback to a previous version. Comparing versions will be very basic, since I haven't found a script that shows the difference between two HTML documents and I am not keen on writing one myself.

What next?

I've never worked on these topics before, and after a search for other people's solutions (including Ben Poole's DominoWiki), none of them offered the solution I have in mind.

In any case, I've decided to work with an external database to store the 'checked out' flags and the older versions of the documents, preventing slowing down the application. To make it more fun, I am going to create a standalone Wiki online so that you can follow the progress. I'll publish code fragments as I go along.

Any downloads? I'll try to add some in a later stage of my work. And no, d-works is not oficially released yet. I'll keep you posted.