One major annoyance when creating offline stories is that one does not get to the freshly created story, but to the story manager instead where you have links to edit/delete/publish the story, but can't read/view the story in its full presentation. The way I see it, creating stories offline often serves the purpose to re-read the story before publishing it - yet to do this, one has to click several times between the story manager interface where stories are set online and the story view where the story can be read/viewed.

I tried to fix this and I'm asking whether you agree that what I came up with is preferrable to the status quo. Here's what's changed:

• When a story is created, one is always redirected to the full story view. (This should always be viewable for the author, even on websites where the author does not hold any special roles, right?)
• I changed the story.onlinelink_macro default behavior to only display a link to set the story online if the story is offline, but not to set it offline if it is online. To get links in both directions, the macro must be called with the option mode="toggle".
• The default story/main.skin gets a story.onlinelink macro with default behaviour (i.e. link is only displayd to set story online if it is currently offline) next to the story.editlink. The storymanager view gets a story.onlinelink with mode="toggle", i.e the online/offline link is always displayed.

With these changes, creating a story as offline is equivalent to seeing a preview before publishing, with links to either do some more editing or set it online.

What do you think?

i'm basically +1 for your proposal, the only problem i see (and this is the reason for the way i implemented it) is that many users won't recognize that the story is offline if they're redirected to the full view after saving the story (we had that problem before the storymanager was implemented). just the fact that there's an additional link for publishing the story is imo not enough, we'll have to clearly mark the story as offline (something like a line in the header saying "this story is currently offline. click here to publish it").

second we'll have to make sure that the offline-story either doesn't appear in listings (i think now it does) or that it is unambigously marked as "you can see the story because you're the author, but everybody else can't").

brilliant ideas (also from robert!), very useful. i want that. i'd also like to be able to do things in the story view, as an admin (or owner of the story), that i can only do in the storypool currently. for example, when i open that story i wrote and i want to set it offline/online or delete it, i have to search for it in the storypool, and i have to do it clumsy because i have to flick back through 11 pages until i find it. instead, i'd like to have the apropriate links right below it.

i figure i can do this simply by editing the skin; would be nice to have it in the default skin, though.