I’ve just started collaborating with a new team in Fibery and in these early stages we are doing a lot of planning, creating specs for things, marketing plans, etc, etc. This process involves multiple members contributing their thoughts to these docs over time. We are wanting a way to highlight changes made by given members, and/or “changes since last visit/view” so we can focus on what’s new as-needed.
Unfortunately I don’t see a 100% ideal way to do this effectively in Fibery just yet. The best I’ve come up with is for each user to highlight their own changes and add a comment describing what they did, but it’s clunky and cluttering when you don’t need/want to see those changes, you can’t compare before/after, etc.
Obviously a proper history function would be great to have. In the absence of that, what’s the best solution you’ve found?
Interesting problem. Indeed versioning would solve this problem, we’ll add this case into History feature. So far it is indeed hard to propose a good solution, just special marks in a text maybe
Yeah, I thought of different editors utilizing different formats, e.g. bold, italic, underline. Obviously there are issues with that though. Simpler and less obtrusive could perhaps be to add distinguishing regular characters to the beginning of edited lines/paragraphs, or even to sort of enclose them. But all of this is hard to clean up later.
We’re on the same page, it seems: no perfect way yet, but it’s in the plans, so that’s good. And we’ll make do for now…
I don’t know if you had thought of it, but each user can highlight text that he/she has added and then link to the User entity for him/herself.
Anyone can then click on the text and see who added it, and it’s a bit less obtrusive/cluttered than using the comments feature.
Plus, if the References extension is enabled for the user type, it’s possible to open a user entity and see everything that a person has contributed.
Oh my god, I hadn’t thought of it!! That’s actually brilliant. Obviously we still need history at some point, but this is basically “manual history” in a sense. Thank you!
And on a positive note re: Fibery in its present state, I’ll just say that this kind of flexibility is what helps make it a better option than most any other, despite lacking some features that others may have. Very often you can find a reasonable workaround…
By the way, in case it’s not obvious, you might want to recommend that users only highlight/link the headline for a block of text if they’re adding a lot. You can then assume that everything after the headline until the next text block was written by them.
Also, you could perhaps ask people to include a date in the headline.
I don’t want to throw more into the mix, but you could also just use #mention of a user prior to typing text…
These both show up in the user entity view references section:
Yeah, I did think of that option, but I find it more obtrusive, especially since it is harder to remove later if/when you want to “finalize” the document. The linked references you suggested first are pretty out-of-the-way, i.e. don’t interrupt the flow of text, and easily removed in the right sidebar if desired. So I think they’re a pretty great solution. Date would be nice to have, and comments could make the date text unobtrusive inside the comment, but I think we can do without dates for now.
And we’ll make do for now…
