ezautosave: drafts that save themselves
This page is for editors who lose work when a browser closes, and for administrators who tune autosave. ezautosave
saves the draft of the object you are editing automatically, and adds an inline preview to the admin edit page. It is
based on QH Autosave.
What it does
- Saves the draft every
Intervalseconds. - Saves it when you leave a form field after changing something (
TrackUserInput). - Hides the Store draft button (
HideStoreDraftButton), which is no longer needed. - Tries to save when the editor leaves the edit page unexpectedly (back button, closing the browser).
- Gives the admin edit form an inline preview of the draft.
Nothing needs to be done by the editor: edit as usual, and the draft is stored.
Settings
| File | Block | Key | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|---|
autosave.ini | AutosaveSettings | Interval | 180 | Seconds between two automatic saves |
autosave.ini | AutosaveSettings | TrackUserInput | enabled | Save when the user leaves a field that changed; when disabled, only the interval saves |
autosave.ini | AutosaveSettings | HideStoreDraftButton | enabled | Hide the Store draft button |
autosave.ini | AutosaveSettings | HidePreviewLink | disabled | Hide the preview link |
autosave.ini | BrowserWorkarounds | (Internet Explorer 11) | Autosave is disabled in IE 11 when the form has a password field, because IE 11 cannot post a form to an iframe while a password field has focus |
What changed in the Exponential 6 releases
| Version | Date | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 6.0.1 to 6.0.4 | Version, license (GPL-2.0-or-later in composer.json), German translations; the description names Exponential. | |
| 6.0.4, 6.0.5 | 30 September to 1 October 2026 | Autosave and the draft preview run on Exponential UI's exp::autosave when expui is active, in the admin and in the ezwebin templates, with the YUI version as the fallback. See below. Requires se7enxweb/expui ^1.0.0.1. |
| 6.0.6 | 2 October 2026 | The admin edit form's YUI autosave and preview are removed. design.ini no longer adds ezautosubmit.js and ezcontentpreview.js to every admin page (with YUI gone from the admin they stopped the scripts after them in the packed file). The preview link's arrows are drawn in the stylesheet. |
| 6.0.7 | The front-end YUI autosave is removed too: the ezwebin design's autosave template keeps only its Exponential UI code (exp::autosave, with exp_config()), and ezautosubmit.js is gone. The README documents Exp.autosave.AutoSubmit. |
About 6.0.4 and 6.0.5: the same form is posted to the same address with the same fields, the same messages and the same hidden Store draft button. The preview opens, saves first and closes the same way. The rich text editor is asked to save into the form first, so a draft is no longer saved twice after the editor rewrote its textarea.
For developers
Exp.autosave.AutoSubmitsubmits a form at an interval, or when something changed, to an ezjscore call. It triggers the eventsinit,beforesave,success,errorandabort.- The admin's preview pane is
Exp.autosave.Preview. - The edit templates (
design/adminanddesign/ezwebin,content/edit/autosave.tpl) show both in use.
See YUI removal.
Related pages
- jQuery 4 and YUI removal
- Online editor on TinyMCE 8
- Chronicle and release notes
- Change ledger
- Behaviour changes of the extensions
- Months: 2026-09, 2026-10 (all extensions)
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