Add support for page creation and edit approvals

[aam1r]

Once a team member has sufficient permissions, they are currently able to create and edit pages as they'd like.

It would be nice to have an approval system where each creation or update has to be approved.

Think of it like GitHub's Pull Requests but for Outline 🙂.

The benefits of something like this is to have a manager or administrator be able to verify and review changes before they're made public to the entire team.

[tommoor]

This is exactly the direction we're planning on going with maintainers – you'll be able to make certain folks "maintainer" roles and have the PR-like workflow for documents, I think it'll be very powerful.

[stale[bot]]

Hey! The issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed soon if no further activity occurs. Please reply here if you wish for the issue to be kept open.

[cisoLKT]

It would be great if this could be enabled per-page and enforced (if enabled) and would include a diff view (e.g. similar to Microsoft Word "track changes")

[almereyda]

This same system could be used to implement something similar to Wikipedia locked pages:

As a user, I need to select a desired revision as canonical, in so newer changes to a document are not represented publicly.

This scenario would be allowed by an incremental workflow for pushing changes as described above.

"PR-like workflow for documents"

appears to combine the best of both worlds, independent editing, and track changes features.

While the PR workflow affects internal work on documents, the canonical revision affects the public view of them. Also see

• #3576

for more ways to access revisions publicly.

An ability for marking versions to fit to an imaginable release of a set of Nested Documents in Outline could also feel to be a useful addition to the editorial workflows.

[AlexBollmann]

This feature is inevitable for business use. Is there anything planned or is it to much of a migration?

[Limezy]

I'm sure it'll come, we have to be patient (and support the project) ! The diff view has just been merged and will be shipped in the next release The inline comments are (apparently) also supposed to be shipped in the next release That's already two very big steps towards a full approval process, as I believe that once you have both it shouldn't be too difficult to finish the job (at least supporting a basic workflow, to be refined later)

[almereyda]

Martin Kleppmann from Ink & Switch has given a presentation on "New algorithms for collaborative text editing" at StrangeLoop 2023. I feel it contains a wealth of research regarding our subject here. The example is not based on Yjs, but AutoMerge, but with the knowledge now out in the open, we can most probably expect Kevin Jahns wanting to catch up with this kind of feature in their CRDT implementation.

• "New algorithms for collaborative text editing" by Martin Kleppmann (Strange Loop 2023) - YouTube
• Upwelling: Combining real-time collaboration with version control for writers.

They have a separate implementation for tracking rich-text metadata:

• Peritext: A CRDT for Rich-Text Collaboration
• inkandswitch/peritext: A CRDT for asynchronous rich-text collaboration, where authors can work independently and then merge their changes.