Handling Intermediate Changes

Handling Intermediate Changes

If you are working on a page in a particular working copy, and one of your colleagues edits the same page in a different working copy and publishes it, you may, in rare cases, have to deal with intermediate changes to the same content.

Scrivito indicates conflicting changes to content by means of notifications in the sidebar. In case a conflict exists, the top menu includes an item for overriding the changes that were published in the meantime. Please complete reading this article before selecting the “Override published changes” option.

Working copies allow you to work independently of each other, even on the same content. In general, applying different edits to the same page doesn’t pose a problem because the changed parts are merged automatically when the page is published. So, if Paula edits the headline and the body text of a page, and John replaces a couple of images, no conflict will arise.

However, if exactly the same piece of content is modified in more than one working copy, the editor who publishes their changes first triggers a conflict in the other working copy, blocking its publishing.

We don’t want the faster colleague to lose their work by letting anyone publish another, possibly incomplete or outdated version of that same content without notice. That’s what conflicts and notifications are all about. Here’s how you could proceed in such a case.

How to merge different versions of a page

  • In your working copy, open the changes list (via the sidebar) and select from it a grayed-out item preventing the working copy from being published. This opens the selected page.
  • Using the page menu, you can completely revert the changes you made to the page. Choosing this option, you accept that the already published version takes precedence over yours. In fact, this causes your version of the page to be reset to the published version.
  • Or, again using the page menu, you can instruct Scrivito to override the published version with yours when publishing the latter. Before doing this, you might want to take a thorough look at what has been changed, so you can set things straight later on.
  • Or, directly walk through your changes to the page and compare them with what has been published in order to get the best out of the two versions. Then select the “Override” item from the page menu.
  • Continue with the next page to which intermediate changes were made.
  • Finally, if no more warning triangles show up in the changes list or the sidebar, publish your work, or transfer the pages to a different working copy for publishing them separately.