Autosave

Autosave stores the draft you are editing by itself, so a closed browser tab, a lost connection or a crashed computer costs little work. It comes with the extension ezautosave, which the setup wizard of Exponential 6 switches on for every new site. Editors do nothing: edit as usual, and the draft is stored.

What it does

• It stores the draft at a fixed interval, every 3 minutes unless your site set another interval.
• It stores the draft when you leave a field you changed.
• It tries to store the draft when you leave the edit form unexpectedly, with the Back button or by closing the browser.
• It hides the button Store draft, which is no longer needed. Store draft and exit stays, for when you want to stop and come back later.

The bar of buttons at the top of the edit form says when the draft was last stored, for example Draft saved at 09:28 pm (0 minutes ago), and counts the minutes since. While a save runs it says The draft is being saved; if a save fails, it says so in the same place.

What autosave does not do

• It never publishes. A stored draft is still a draft: only you see it, and the site shows the published version until you press Send for publishing.
• It does not keep a history of every save: each save overwrites the same draft.
• Fields with an error are stored as they are; the error is reported when you publish.

Find a draft again

A draft stored by autosave is an ordinary draft. Find it under My drafts on the dashboard, or press Edit on the item: the page Possible edit conflict offers your draft to continue. See Dealing with edit conflicts.

For administrators

The settings are in autosave.ini, block [AutosaveSettings]:

The extension is switched on and off like any other, in Setup > Extensions, by an administrator. In Exponential 6 it no longer needs the YUI library: it runs on Exponential UI, in the administration and in the website designs.

What can go wrong

• The bar says an error occurred while autosaving. Your session may have ended, or the connection dropped. Press Store draft and exit or Send for publishing; if you are asked to sign in, sign in and open My drafts.
• The Store draft button is missing. That is autosave; the draft is stored for you.
• Old drafts pile up. Autosave keeps every draft you leave. Tidy My drafts from time to time.

Read more

• Creating and editing content, in the help center.
• ezautosave: drafts that save themselves, the feature page.
• The edit form