Creating Multiple Drafts For Publishing Later

Sometimes during commute, there are some things that can be put together quickly along with images, so ideally, everything can be created within discourse and save to draft. When trying to create another topic, only the previous one is shown.

Since there isn’t a draft feature (like wordpress posts) that can be used to start multiple topics (ideas + images + formatting) and prepare it for publishing, any tips and how to handle this?

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You could set up a “Draft Topics” private category. Then move the topic to the public category when ready.

Moving a topic to a new category won’t generate an email/notification for users watching/tracking that category, so you would want to copy/paste the content if you want to trigger an email/notification. (I believe this is correct but you can test it.)

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Another “hacky” way to do it would be to create a low-trust account (TL0), post the new topic from that account and then approve it from an admin or moderator account at a later time.

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Write a private message to yourself

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Thanks for all the suggestions! Will give them a try.

@riking Never thought to private message. Will I be able to then just publish as a regular post or will I need to cut and paste into a new post?

If you have replies in mind, there is a drafts section on your user profile now so they are much easier to find. You can have as many reply drafts in flight as you like.

However, if you wish to create multiple new topics, you’ll still need to send yourself private messages as @riking mentioned; at the moment, only one new topic draft is supported, still.

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Is there any plan to support multiple draft topics?

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Additionally, for staff this pattern has been formalized in the Shared Drafts feature!

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Has anyone considered whether or not multiple drafts could be supported by a plugin?

I think it is a really valuable feature to be able to draft several posts, potentially scheduling them for publishing at some future point without having to revert to hackery…

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If you are looking at scheduling posts have a look at the shared draft feature

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I think that will work, I’ll give it a try :grinning:

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Does a multiple drafts feature lie anywhere on the roadmap? These are all good ways around it, but it would be really nice to have a built-in “drafts” tab where you can work on multiple posts at once :slight_smile:

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Just as an FYI, if a user is Watching or Watching First Post for the category you publish it to then they will receive a notification and have a direct link to that topic, so it may not be as discreet as you think.

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See Allow multiple ‘new topic’ drafts