I’ve recently merged a new feature into Discourse called Shared Drafts. The feature is meant for forums where staff members want to work on drafts together before publishing them.
How to Enable
Go into your site’s settings and designate a category as shared drafts category:
You can use the staff category that comes with Discourse to do this, or you can use a new category if you prefer. Make sure that the category is restricted to those who want to view and publish drafts!
Creating a Shared Draft
When creating a topic, click the composer action button at the top left of the composer, and choose Shared Draft:
Once selected, you can choose the destination category where you’d like the topic published when it’s ready.
When it’s ready, click Create Shared Draft and your shared draft will be created!
Finding + Reviewing Shared Drafts
You can see a list of your shared drafts by visiting the category you chose when enabling the feature. When in the category you’ll see the destination category for the topic in the topic list:
As a bonus, you’ll also see your shared draft listed when browsing the destination category, above the regular topic list. This is an easy way to see what drafts are in progress for a particular category:
Note that topics within the designated shared drafts category will not be displayed in any ‘latest’ topic lists.
Publishing your Shared Draft
When you view your shared draft, you get a big control area at the top that allows you to publish it:
Once you click Publish Shared Draft, the following will happen:
- The topic will be published into the destination category
- The timestamps of the topic will be changed to be the time of publishing
- Any edit history on the first post will be removed
Shared Drafts work nicely with topic timers, so you can still publish at a specific time in the future if you like.
Please try out the new feature and let us know how it works!
