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, it's just a matter of time for you to have to deal with intermediate changes to the same content.

Scrivito indicates conflicting changes to content by means of notifications in the corresponding sidebar section.

In case a conflict exists, the page menu includes an item for overriding the changes that were published in the meantime.

What's going on here?

Working copies allow you to work independently of each other, even on the same content. If this happens, the one who publishes their working copy first, wins, so to speak. The colleague who comes second cannot publish their working copy right away because Scrivito has detected that the same content has been modified and published in the meantime.

We don't want your faster colleague to lose their work by letting you brute-force publish another, possibly incomplete or outdated version of that same content without notice. That's all. Here's how you could proceed in this case.

How to merge different versions of a page

  • Open the published content on a separate browser tab.
  • In your working copy, open the changes list and select from it the page or one of the pages marked with a red warning triangle. This opens the selected page that was also changed and then published by someone else.
  • You can completely revert the changes you made to the page (as compared to what has been published in the meantime). Or, activate the Changes mode to make these changes visible and decide on them individually.
  • Walk through the page and inspect every widget. A widget marked as deleted in your working copy exists in the published content. To not delete it when publishing later on, select Restore from the widget menu.
    You can ignore widgets that are not currently present in the published content because you created them in your working copy. However, a widget containing red and green parts has been modified concurrently. No action is required on this widget if you accept the changes you see. If not, carefully merge the content of the published widget with your changes, or revert the changes you made to it in your working copy. Use the corresponding widget menu item for this.
  • When you're done with deciding on the changes made to the page, select “Override concurrent changes to page” from its menu.
  • Continue with the next page to which intermediate changes were made.
  • Finally, if no more warning triangles show up in the changes list, publish your working copy.

If you frequently encounter intermediate changes to documents you've been working on, you might consider using working copies rather for specific topics or website sections than for selective changes to individual documents.

Comparing content

Selecting the Changes mode from the Scrivito panel lets you examine what has been added to and deleted from the page currently displayed. The light green parts indicate what the page will finally include, whereas the light red parts are omitted.

If you want to merge changes to the published page with the changes you made in your working copy, you can use classic copy & paste to transfer text from the Changes view to another browser tab displaying the same page in Edit mode.

Note that in Changes mode, widgets that have been moved are displayed twice, in their previous location (with a red frame around them) and in their new location (with a green frame).