Allow users to "petition" for a post lock to be released

[markjaquith]

Our post locking prevents two people from editing the same post, but introduces some awkwardness, in that your options are to wait and hope they exit the post (which slows you down), or boot them out (which could be rude or disruptive), or communicate with them through some other medium (which you might not have). It would be nice if there was a third option... to "raise your hand" about wanting to edit the post. If the editing user is actually working on the post, they could say "not now," or they could "save and release". Or, if there is no response, that could be communicated to the petitioning user, as that could indicate that the editing user has left the post open and abandoned their computer. We could even communicate when the last mouse movement or on-page activity was.

[lukecavanagh]

@markjaquith 

Sounds like a logical addition.

[desrosj]

I think this idea still has merit. There are additional factors that need to be considered today, such as the REST API, the block editor, and backwards compatibility with the Classic Editor.

@adamsilverstein what are your thoughts on this one?

[adamsilverstein]

In general I love the idea of adding this option and can imagine it being useful as an extension of the existing post locking feature. Functionally I anticipate some possible complexity and it might be useful to think through the flows @markjaquith outlined in the description and add some simple mockups of the expected UI.

[mdwolinski]

This issue was discussed in #design today. The general consensus is that this is a low priority issue that will be solved by multi-user editing will supersede the need.

[ibdz]

In Design triage today, we agreed that it's a good idea to add a stop-gap, but that would probably be improved by overall better co-editing (multi-user editing) features that will be included in Gutenberg at a later time.

So, I have to remove the 'needs-design-feedback'.

[callumbw95]

Hi All,

Just wondering if this is still relevant within the scope of WordPress today? ​Phase 3 is moving away from locking posts, and instead move towards more collaborative post / page creation through data views. Whilst this hasn't been released yet, I feel submitting a patch to change post locking at this stage would wrongly or rightly not get much traction and as of such I believe this ticket should be marked with the close tag, leaving the ticket open for further conversation around this topic before it it closed indefinitely.

[adamsilverstein]

Given our commitment to backwards compatibility, we may want to keep the post locking feature around even after collaborative editing ships.

I'm curious how folks feel about post locking in a collaborative editing world...

• Would some users still want post locking instead of collaborative editing?

If we are planning to keep post locking as a feature for certain use cases we can probably leave this ticket open.