A content editor who loses their work by accident can recover it (autosave)
User story
Given that I am logged in as a content editor,
when I am adding or editing a piece of content
I want to be reassured that my writing and multimedia are being automatically saved so i can have peace of mind.
Given that I am logged in as a content editor,
when my browser or computer crashes or I navigate away from a post creation or editing form
I want to have an option to recover everything i was working on so that my day isn't ruined.
Background
I think we've all been there. I use a giant 'Form history control' plugin in Firefox which slows down my whole browser because i'm that paranoid. Many of us develop good habits like doing as much writing work offline as possible. But we all slip up, and the rich text, multimedia content authoring experience Drutopia offers increasingly makes editing in-browser the only way to truly bring a piece together. It's the responsibility of the editing tool to offer autosaving and people are right to expect that.
This is also one of the 5 Ways to Improve the Usability of the Drupal Content Editor Experience reported by Suzanne Dergacheva based on UX testing and a content editor survey:
When you ask content editors what we should change about the admin UI, this one always come up. All content authors have anxiety about losing their content. And when we ran our user testing with other CMS’s, autosave clearly reassured and delighted editors. For example, Contentful has a nice autosave message that helps users know that their content is saved.
There is an open issue for adding autosave to Drupal. It would be great to get momentum behind implementing this!
Proposed solution
https://www.drupal.org/project/autosave_form
(Credit to Suzanne again, in her own comments.)
Remaining work
-
wait for the Autosave form module to mature? -
test it -
identify any drawbacks and try to mitigate them -
enable with Drutopia base by default -
document additional steps needed in new feature development, if any