Allow some fields (author, terms) to be edited without unlinking from the original post (was: Persiste canonical association)

[mikelking]

Summary When using distributor to push or pull in content, we would like the ability to have editors updated category and author without unlinking the article from its original canonical version. Currently, the category is coming in as uncategorized in many cases and users are being asked to unlink them to add appropriate category for that site. Also some authors are not pulling in and editors again have to unlink to add them. Ideally the authors from original brand would automatically pull over even if they do not currently exist on that brand.

[mikelking]

Realized there may be missing context, regarding authors & taxonomies.

The receiving site does not always have the same authors/staff or taxonomies as the originating site and it has been observed that the taxes default to uncategorized which makes sense but the origin (canonical) association give munged.

[jeffpaul]

@mikelking thanks again for the feedback, it's greatly appreciated!

In a scenario where an editor updates a category or author without unlinking the article from its original canonical version, what would you expect to happen if the original brand article's category or author was updated?

[mikelking]

@jeffpaul ,

Once again apologies for the delay. I believe the desired outcome is not to alter the original content at the source, only to ensure that the duplicate maintains it's link to that canonical version.

***Updated as I forgot to tag you

[bgasperosky]

I too would greatly appreciate this feature. Great plugin by the way. The plugin is behaving a bit differently on my multisite network than what mikelking is experiencing. When I distribute content from one site to another within my multisite network, The category from the source is retained on the copy. I too would like to be able to edit the category though, and cannot at this time. I even tried adding the category I need in the distributed copy to the source site, but the categories did not update on the syndicated version. I tried removing the syndicated version, then resyndicating it to the second site, and only the original category was restored, the newer category I added after initially syndicating the post did not come across. For now, my workaround is to manually build menus on each site and not use category functionality on the front end of the site. I believe the feature mikelking described will help me out quite a bit as well.

[jeffpaul]

@bgasperosky welcome to Distributor and thanks for the feedback! This issue is currently milestoned for our 2.0.0 release, slated for later this year, so stay tuned to release updates, but we'd otherwise welcome a PR to assist on this issue.

[ravinderk]

@jeffpaul I understand receiver expectations, but it should be done with a distribution agreement which means the distributor should choose what receiver can edit after content distribution. The distribution agreement implies a set of rules which apply when the receiver edits distributed content, i.e., Edit tags, categories, author, etc.

I was thinking about two types of distribution agreements: 1- Global: distributor can set it when adding external/internal connect 2- Per post type: distributor can set it when distributing post types. Distributors can use it to overwrite global digital agreements.

Let me know what you think.

cc: @peterwilsoncc

[jeffpaul]

I think I'm fine with broadly allowing remote sites to edit some meta without explicit agreement or knowledge from the origin site/post. Definitely allow for filters to change that. Open to what the default would be as well as wether we expose a setting for this or have it all handled in code.

[aaronware]

@ravinderk I 2nd @jeffpaul filters here are definitely key. A real world example we currently have is when using Distributor w/ WooCommerce. We have a main "hub" where we distribute product content to multiple external sites however, we do not want the hub site to dictate what products are Instock, Catalog Visibility, Pricing etc.

We already have the ability to filter what taxonomies and meta get pushed or pulled which is great however, w/ the admin locked down those fields aren't available edit. We have some workarounds we've done in these scenarios but it would be great to be able to adjust that.

[peterwilsoncc]

I think this will need to be worked on alongside #468.

In that issue the categories can be added in the existing interface by clicking on the label so it would be good to fix that issue before attempting to reverse it for this issue.