Has anyone considered working on a “save draft” feature for bbPress?

I haven’t seen this with any other forum software, but it would be quite handy with a forum like mine, where many posts take people hours to write. You also often end up writing those posts over a number of days, meaning that you have to save the draft somewhere else.

Saving the draft could happen either manually by pressing a “Save draft” button, and/or automatically like Gmail for instance does it. There should also be a way to delete old drafts. (In a perfect world, the system would automatically delete drafts older than X number of days.)

The draft feature could perhaps also be used to preview one’s message.

How difficult do you think it would be to implement a feature like this? I am not very familiar with writing plugins, so I’m not entirely sure if I can imagine the scope of a feature like this.

I originally thought that one could make use of the post_status field in the bb_posts table, but it seems that the field in question is of the tinyint(1) type, therefore only allowing for two settings: 0 (published) or 1 (deleted).

[@null Member 16 years, 4 months ago]

Perhaps this plugin can help you out:

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/edit-history/

Not quite what you need, but comes close. Or a hide topic option so people can hide their topic untill they want to publish it. Don’t know if there is such a publish plugin around though

[@vilimaunula Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Thanks for the suggestion, Null! _ck_’s plugin is indeed not quite what I had in mind, but I’ll see if it gives me any ideas about how to implement a draft feature.

[@_ck_ Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Drafts are for blogging systems.

I can’t imagine why a forum would need drafts.

However admin have the ability to edit deleted posts so you could create and delete a topic and then edit the post – then undelete it.

bbPress won’t show topics/posts that don’t have a status of zero so if you wrote a plugin for drafts you could just create topics/posts with a special status of like “7” until it was published.

[@vilimaunula Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

(The blockquote markup doesn’t seem to work anymore?)

_ck_ wrote:

Drafts are for blogging systems.

I can’t imagine why a forum would need drafts.

Indeed, a typical forum would most probably not need a draft feature.

But in my case, many posts to my forums are mini-essays in film criticism, or responses to such essays. As one write-up tends to take its writer a number of days to complete, that writer needs either to write the post elsewhere or at least to save the drafts somewhere. It would just be easier if that “somewhere” was the forum software itself.

I’d like to encourage thoughtfulness, contemplation and careful argumentation on my forums over the regular “reply as fast as you can” attitude that plagues so much of online discussion. To boost the “signal to noise” ratio, so to speak. A function allowing one to save a draft and give it one more read before publishing would perhaps further encourage that attitude.

Thanks for the hint about modifying the post status! I’ll see what I can make of it.

[@steveg190 Member 16 years, 4 months ago]

I’m interested in this too. Mostly I’m interested because my current forum that I’m converting from (phpbb) allows you to preview your post, and that feature will be sorely missed. Bring able to save a draft of it would fit right along side a preview, pretty much just like the way WordPress allows authors to save/preview drafts. Now, I’m not a php person in any way (although I wish I was) but I can see it could easily work to make a plug-in or mod that would allow you the option to save your post draft for later with a different post status and pull it or all your saved/unpublished drafts into a single page by pulling them based on the status and your user id. From there you could edit those posts and “publish” them by saving and changing the status code to so that bbPress “sees” it as a valid post rather than a “deleted” or “saved draft”.

I tinkered with this idea a little while ago but with my php knowledge limited to hacking peices here and there to suit my needs it’s just too much of a task. I can’t imagine it would be too complicated to implement. Let us know if this pans out Vili or anyone else who has an urge to work on something like this.

[@chrishajer Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

How about this for post preview?

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/live-comment-preview/

[@eversatile Participant 9 years, 11 months ago]

I am surprised that after over 6 years a solution to this still has not been found. I have been trying to create this exact feature and ran into this post. So far I have not had any luck but I REALLY want this to work.

[@robkk Moderator 9 years, 11 months ago]

@eversatile

please don’t bump old topics especially more than 2 or more years

on drafts as a feature im siding on _ck_’s old post

Drafts are for blogging systems.

I can’t imagine why a forum would need drafts.

it also mentions post preview in this topic too , if you want something iike that you can use this plugin

github.com/r-a-y/bbp-live-preview

if you really need a draft feature post a job at http://jobs.wordpress.net and see if a developer can assist you.