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A plan to provide a detailed text diff? #191
Description
Question
Our large editorial team reviews multiple iterations of documents using long form content in single text areas. In this kind of situation, the "changed field" indicator is not sufficiently effective in spotting differences - the editor would still need to proofread a page-long "changed field" to spot the differences, which are often minute.
Do you plan / would you consider a detailed diff screen where the differences in the content of the field would be made easily notice-able?
We are looking for character/word level of precision.
Additional context
No response
Activity
[-]Do you plan to provide a detailed text diff?[/-][+]A plan to provide a detailed text diff?[/+]engram-design commentedon Jul 21, 2023
No plans yet, but I've often thought this would be very neat. The tricky part is dealing with all the different types of fields out there, some of which don't have plain-text representations of field content. So this would need to be constrained to "plain text" fields like Redactor, etc.
We'll add it to our list for sure.
andreimoment commentedon Jul 21, 2023
engram-design commentedon Jul 22, 2023
That’s maybe an option for sure, we’ll have to try out a few different options to see what works.
MoritzLost commentedon Feb 6, 2024
Just dropping this here: https://craftcms.com/events/dot-all-2023/sessions/building-a-collaborative-content-platform-with-the-control-panel
I built a custom diff view for a project, I showed a bit about this in my talk at Dot All 2023 (skip to around 36:10). The code examples repository has a code example showing the 'text representation for every field' bit. Talk to me if you want to learn more!
Might turn this into a plugin at some point if there's some interest and I have the time.
engram-design commentedon Feb 6, 2024
I did actually watch this talk (would've loved to have been there) and saw that! Thanks also for the shout-out 🤩
We've been kind of waiting to see what Craft themselves were going to do here, as workflow-type changes were road-mapped for Craft 5, but shifted to Craft 6. We also tackled something very similar in the Zen plugin which does do proper text-diffing for numerous fields.
MoritzLost commentedon Feb 6, 2024
@engram-design Right, I remember we talked in the Discord server. Just wanted to leave the link here in case someone wants to roll their own module in the meantime :)
Feels like native diffs in Craft are vaporware at this point 😅
Haven't used Zen yet, but the screenshot in the plugin store already looks way better than my custom solution! The 'convert everything to plain text' approach is sort of a workaround anyway. Something closer to the native UI would be to use the normal fields (or element cards/chips for element fields) and somehow highlight them to show changes. But I think that would be even more difficult …
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