Publishing an empty post results in success

[kawauso]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to Add New post screen
2. Publish post
3. Success message is displayed with link to initial auto-draft of post

The issue can be traced back to the editpost switch case in post.php (line 204), which calls edit_post() and redirect_post().

edit_post() saves any meta values passed with the post to the auto-draft, which isn't necessarily desirable, and returns the auto-draft post ID.

redirect_post() then defaults to status message code 6 which incorrectly reports success in publishing.

It seems like this would be best solved in the front-end Javascript. Just a simple check that disables the Publish button until you've made a change to something on the page.

This sounds like it might even be a duplicate/new behaviour of #11082

Initially disable submit inputs (meta-boxes.php)

Attached a diff that disables the submit buttons in the posting form. As soon as the user changes the contents of the title field and clicks off (causing the title field to lose focus), some background JS re-enables the submit inputs. (Just to clarify, all the diff does is initially disable the submit input elements).

By the look of that, the elements are disabled in HTML to start with? That will cause problems for non-js/accessible modes. Best bet would be to disable them via JS when loading the document if we took that route.

Ah, hadn't thought of that. Why don't we just validate the title and content fields and return a message if said validation fails?

Initially disable submit inputs via JS (post.js)

New diff disables the submit inputs through JS as suggested above. Appears to work nicely.

Replying to eddieringle:

New diff disables the submit inputs through JS as suggested above. Appears to work nicely.

Good to see some life on this ticket. The new diff works fine for the HTML mode, but doesn't seem to work with TinyMCE / the visual editor. Also for future reference, you only need to provide a diff for the .dev version.

Works for me in both editors.

Related: #11082

#22483 was marked as a duplicate.

Two primary issues I see with the JS method:

1. Prematurely enables the update button if a non-crucial (title, content, excerpt) element is changed. For example, custom fields. (Mentioned in my dupe ticket #22483)
2. Doesn't enable the button if only a featured image is added

I suspect there are also accessibility issues with a button that can only be used after being enabled (undisabled?) via javascript - but that is far from any area of expertise I may have.

The root of the problem seems to come from WordPress not allowing new posts without a title, content, and excerpt (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/wp-includes/post.php#L2701).

While it may be correct for WordPress to not allow publishing a post without title/content, I think draft posts still need to be allowed. Someone may very well want to first upload and nice featured image and preview the post before adding anything else, and they cannot currently do so.

I'm not sure of the best way to go about patching this, but I'm going to tinker around and see what I can put together that makes any kind of sense to the user.