#240: Improve locking configurability

Contents

This PLIP proposes to a) make it harder to accidentally leave content items in a locked state, and b) make it easier to adjust the lock timeout or disable locking entirely.

Proposed by

David Glick

Proposal type

Architecture

Assigned to release

Plone 3.3 (Unreleased)

State

in-progress

Definitions

Motivation

Currently it is too easy to lock a content item without realizing that one has done so. This happens when entering edit mode (either full edit mode or inline edit mode) and then failing to hit the Save or Cancel button. Since locks never timeout in the default configuration, this results in littering the site with locked items which may be confusing to users.

Additionally, it is not possible to disable locking or change the lock timeout value without monkey patching plone.locking, as far as I can tell.

Assumptions

This proposal is intended as a quick fix to the existing locking implementation, rather than a more far-reaching refactoring as is discussed in http://plone.org/products/plone/roadmap/189

Proposal

I propose that, at the least:

The default lock timeout for locks created through the web should be 5 minutes. A periodic KSS action can extend the lock as long as the user remains on the page. Locks created through other means such as WebDAV should still default to never timing out.

Additionally, we should consider:

Create a configlet to turn locking on/off and adjust the timeout value.

Implementation

Deliverables

Risks

Progress log

Participants

David Glick is willing to serve in an advisory role to whoever is willing to implement this.

Sections

Personal tools