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Revisions

Revisions are tricky. To avoid revisions spaghetti, EVERYONE involved needs to work in the Nexus-linked revision. Working in a story at the same time is discouraged.

The Revisions system has changed. It is now intentionally difficult to edit anything BUT the revision.

Published versions of the story and the Draft are now read-only. That means you can see them, but not make changes to them.

A read-only version is grayed-out and you can't type in it:

The only version you can type into will be the Revision.

Sometimes you will see this if you're NOT in the Revision:

You will RARELY want to Override?

Let's say Brendan is in the Revision adding updates to a breaking, already-published story. Khalon sees an error in the live version. Brendan is not ready to publish his updates. Khalon can override the read-only status of the live version to make the change immediately.

This can cause trouble upstream and should only be done in Error Emergencies.

Another reason you may want to override is to edit a Seamus-imported story that does not have a revision.

To do this, go to the Revisions widget and click Edit Live in the upper-right corner.

You will then see this:

And you can click Override? and proceed to change and publish. This can potentially override changes in the Revision, so make sure you know what you're doing and why!

Migrated stories

If you need to edit a migrated story, such as an obit, submit a ticket to IT requesting a remigration of the Seamus story. Include the ID in your request. The remigrated story will have a revision. (You can request multiple migrations in a ticket — just include all the relevant IDs.)

If editing/publishing an obit or other Seamus-migrated story is time-sensitive and you can't wait for a migration request to be completed, in a pinch you can:

  1. Open the draft in Grove;
  2. Manually create a revision using the Start New Revision button from the Revisions widget in the right rail;
  3. Edit and publish from this revision.

Best practices

  • Always work in the latest Revision of a story rather than the Published version of the story.
  • Do not manually create revisions. (There are a couple circumstances where this is OK, like on a Seamus-migrated story with no automatically-created revision.)
  • Do not ignore changes made by other collaborators without conferring with them.
  • Always save and leave a story if you are not actively working on it. Do not stay idle in a story.
  • Only schedule your story when all final edits have been made, and collaborators are no longer in the story.

Finding the latest version

  • You can access a story via a Nexus card or directly in Grove. If someone has manually created an additional Revision, the Nexus method may not work. So don't manually create new Revisions!
  • Searching in Grove with Content Type set to News Story will surface Revisions.

Confirming the latest version

If you go into the latest revision of your story and don’t see what you would expect, confer with your collaborators to ensure you’ve been working in the same version. You can use the Compare tool to identify which version you need to be working on.

Republishing the latest version

  • If an incorrect version of a story is published due to multiple revisions during collaboration, the fastest way to resolve the issue is to use the Compare functionality to pinpoint the correct version. Once identified, simply republish the correct version by selecting Publish Override or Publish, and the incorrect version will be automatically replaced with the correct one.
  • After the correct version of the story has been published, follow up in #grove-community or with IT Support to investigate the potential cause of the incorrect version being published.

Why does this exist

Nexus uses the revision to talk to Grove. Even if you are doing a digital-only story, though, you want to be in the revision. Why?

Because revisions also have the disk icon and the workflow button. If you stay in the published version, you cannot save, leave, come back, share with someone else, etc.

A good way to think of this is …

Stories have three states:

  1. Draft: This is a Grove thing. Ignore it, do not edit it, do nothing with it UNLESS you're in a migrated Seamus story, in which you'll either need to have the story remigrated (so that a revision is generated) or create a new revision.

  2. Revision: An unpublished story or unpublished VERSION of a story. This is what you should edit.

  3. Published: A published story. Whenever you publish, Grove makes another revision.

Starting one

If you start a story in Nexus, the revision is automatically created in Grove, and clicking the Grove link on the card takes you straight there. This is a great way to find the Nexus-linked revision.

If you start a story in Grove, you will automatically be put into the revision when you save for the first time.

After you publish, Grove creates another revision. This revision maintains the link to Nexus. It also brings back the disk icon and workflow icon. You will automatically be put into this revision.

This is how it SHOULD NOT LOOK:

You want to see THE BELOW instead. It means you're in the right place:

Finding one

It's easy to find a revision BUT you have to set Content Type to News Story first:

This will show revisions. You will know them by the Revision tag:

You can search by NPR ID, or any other way, and get revisions — as long as that content filter is set!

On the Recent Activity dashboard widget, if you want to see only revisions and published stories, set up your filters like this:

For the setting that says Published + 1, choose Revisions and Published from the dropdown:

This will show every story you have created or edited, and filter out Drafts.

If you only want to see non-published stories, uncheck Published from the menu.

You may not see a corresponding revision. That's because it's not Recent Activity until you do something in the revision. Shrug.

I don't see it!!!

After 24 hours, Grove unhelpfully stops showing the Recent Revision link at the top of stories.

So if you don't see a yellow box at the top of your story alerting you to the presence of a revision, look under Revisions in the right sidebar:

Ideally, you will see the Nexus-linked revision at the top.

Comparing

Clicking the three-dot icon next to a version (Revision or Published) displays a menu with a list of actions available for that version:

Choose Compare or Compare to Live (they do the same thing) to compare a specific version of a story to the live published version.

Grove will display the differences between the revision you are viewing and the live version:

You can also access the Compare to Live feature within the Revision banner when you are in the latest revision of a story: