Extension:Drafts

The Drafts extension adds the ability to save a draft of a page on the server while editing. Users must be logged in to save drafts, as they are tied to their user account. Drafts are always discarded when they are used to save the page they came from.

Saving Drafts
Drafts are always saved when the user clicks preview or show changes, however, the following behavior is dependent on whether the client's browser has JavaScript enabled or disabled.

Accessing Drafts
If a draft has been saved the user can access them by
 * Returning to the edit screen for the article they saved the draft of, where a list of existing drafts for that user and article will appear at the top of the edit page.
 * Visiting the drafts special page (Special:Drafts) where there is a list of all drafts for that user.

Edge Cases

 * When a page is moved, the drafts which refer to that page are moved with it
 * When a draft is created for a new page but the page is never saved, the draft will still be available for creating the page and will retain the title and namespace
 * When a draft is created for a page and the page is then deleted, the draft will remain, and the behavior will then be just as for drafts of uncreated pages

Draft Expiration
Drafts automatically expire if not modified for a longer specific length of time (configurable). To prevent excessively frequent modifications to the database, these drafts are only actually pruned from the database a fraction of the times (configurable) which a request for a list of drafts are made. Even if pruning never takes place, expired drafts will not be accessible to users.

Installation
The extension needs its own table within the MediaWiki database, and this is the reason you have to execute the update.php script. However, you may be able to save executing the update script if you manually import the contents of the extensions/Drafts/Drafts.sql file into your database, but don't do it directly with MySql because the SQL file itself relies on MediaWiki variables for finding the correct database prefix and table options.

Configuration
The following parameters can be set by defining values for the following variables in your LocalSettings.php file.