Force preview when editing wiki pages

[mario <mario@…>]

It seems to often happen that a wiki page is modified minimally several times, in quick succession… just look at the Timeline to get an idea of how often this happens. This is a little annoying, as it adds noise to the file history, as well as adds fat to the sqlite db file (as each wiki modification is saved entirely, at least so far).

A simple modification of how the buttons to Save and to Preview are presented would help minimize this problem. And that is to:

• Below the wiki edit textarea, only show the buttons [ Preview ] [ Cancel ]
• Below the previewed content, only show the buttons [ Save Changes ] [ Cancel ]

This will force the editor to at least go thru Preview at least once before hitting [ Save Changes ].

[Christopher Lenz]

Such a change would actually conflict with the Trac mantra of "staying out of the way", don't you think?

[mario <mario@…>]

Funny how different people can see things so differently ;)

For me it would be in total harmony with the Trac mantra… rather, the precise opposite can be argued, i.e. that it is the way it is now that goes against the mantra of "not getting in the way", by increasing the likeliness that you inadvertently commit a modified wiki page before you were ready to do so… thus you get lots of extra nonsensical versions in the history for the file, the diff is therefore rendered less useful, wasting time each time you come back to examine the log/diffs of the file, not to say anything about the bloating the db size absolutely unnecessarily.

In addition, doing this I think will also help users realise that there is the Preview option! I have to admit that it took me a few times of page editing cycles before I realised there was a Preview button. But, that's just me ;-(

Anyhow, just looking at the number of times a page gets edited trivially in quick succession, it seems to me to be a good thing.

Maybe the word force is too strong. You are only "forcing" that a modified page is previewed once at least. But if that is a problem, then just switching the order of the Preview and Save buttuns, as per the suggestion of #1212 (making Preview more prominent), may be enough.

[Matthew Good]

What are the current opinions on this? I'd say wontfix.

[Christian Boos]

To cope with the (real) problem raised by this ticket, instead of forcing the preview maybe we could make the ITimelineEventProvider of the Wiki module a bit more intelligent, and have it "collapse" successive edits from the same person in a short period of time, i.e. the often requested feature #38.

So, yes, I say wontfix too.

[anonymous]

see ​http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/ForcePreviewPlugin