Supporting contributors in WordLand

[scripting]

Picking up from this comment by @jeherve in a different thread. I want to be able to discuss this out of the way of users since this is a developer thing.

#15 (comment)

[scripting]

I wonder if someone could make me a contributor on their WordPress site, so I can develop the features to make WordLand work appropriately for contributors.

[jeherve]

I just sent you an invite to a new test site where you'll be able to test WordLand as a contributor.

[scripting]

NEVER MIND -- I FOUND IT

@jeherve -- thanks for the help.

where should i look for the invite?

checked my email, nothing recent from you.

[jeherve]

I've published your test post, so you should now be able to test going back to the WordLand editor when you're an editor and you have a published post on the site. Since you're a contributor, you will not be able to save any changes to that already published post ; you can only submit a new draft for review.

[scripting]

@jeherve -- i'm taking a look at it now, and trying to figure out the best way to approach it.

I'm looking at the big table and an example of a capabilities record.

This is my current understanding, let me know if it's correct.

As a contributor when I publish a draft, all that's happening is that the draft is being submitted for approval by someone else. At that point, I can continue to make changes to the draft, by hitting the paper airplane icon, but once the draft has been approved I can no longer update. That will result in the error dialog I'm seeing. "User cannot edit post"

The goal here is to give the user a better error message. But otherwise the operation worked. They were able to do what a Contributor can do.

Now the question is should I do anything about this?? Right now I don't think so. There are a lot of other cases where WordLand will put up the error message that was returned to it by the server. Something like this should be done as a more comprehensive project, otherwise I'm going to end up creating something that's hard to work with. Technical debt.

I'm going to give it some more thought watching a basketball game tonight. :-)

{
    "edit_pages": true,
    "edit_posts": true,
    "edit_others_posts": true,
    "edit_others_pages": true,
    "delete_posts": true,
    "delete_others_posts": true,
    "edit_theme_options": true,
    "edit_users": false,
    "list_users": true,
    "manage_categories": true,
    "manage_options": true,
    "moderate_comments": true,
    "activate_wordads": true,
    "promote_users": true,
    "publish_posts": true,
    "upload_files": true,
    "delete_users": false,
    "remove_users": true,
    "own_site": true,
    "view_stats": true,
    "activate_plugins": true,
    "update_plugins": false,
    "export": true,
    "import": true
}

[jeherve]

As a contributor when I publish a draft, all that's happening is that the draft is being submitted for approval by someone else. At that point, I can continue to make changes to the draft, by hitting the paper airplane icon, but once the draft has been approved I can no longer update. That will result in the error dialog I'm seeing. "User cannot edit post"

Yes, that's exactly right.

The goal here is to give the user a better error message. But otherwise the operation worked. They were able to do what a Contributor can do.

Instead of an error message, would it be an option to not offer the post in WordLand once it's been published, if you are a contributor?

[scripting]

@jeherve -- i've used software that works like that, and to a user -- it's really frustrating because things stop working that used to work, and there's no explanation and no way to find out that's why it isn't working. At least this way they get a short error message that's accurate, if not very informative (it doesn't say why you can't update the post).

I generally wait on things like this, until I have some more experience with the problem. For right now the way it is seems to be the best option.

[scripting]

A classic example is iTunes on the Mac. Commands would be disabled, and the user isn't given any idea of why. It looks like the software is broken.