Working on drafts locally?

[SachaG]

Is there a way to create or edit drafts locally? Basically, I would like to start working on a draft locally on my own machine, then make it available to NetlifyCMS so others can contribute.

I saw that NetlifyCMS saves drafts in their own branch, but trying to create and push a draft branch manually myself doesn't seem to work. Is this part of the workflow documented anywhere?

[erquhart]

Editorial workflow entries are created as pull requests, but metadata in an orphan ref is used to keep track, not simple to tap into for your own manual pull requests. We're close to merging a PR that will replace the metadata with pull request labels, at which point you'll be able to add the label to your own PR and editorial workflow will pick it up.

PR here: #1961

_{Sent with GitHawk}

[SachaG]

Oh cool. Btw I'm sure you've considered this but what about having a status: draft field in your markdown file's frontmatter? This could coexist with the more complex GitHub branch workflow as a simpler way to work with drafts locally?

[bjrn]

@SachaG there's also netlify-cms-backend-fs which provides an easy way to work on files in the local filesystem when in development mode (although that still doesn't solve integration with the editorial workflow of course).

[erquhart]

Yeah I've considered the need for draft functionality as a separate entity from editorial workflow for a while now, less about a workflow and more about parity with built in draft functionality for SSG's like Jekyll and Hugo, which use a flag as you mentioned. Feature request here: #942

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[erquhart]

This would be resolved by #2977, closing in favor of that.