README

Real-time collaborative editing for Drupal's administration: editors of the same node share one draft of its form instead of overwriting each other, and see who else is there and where they are typing.

Two editors open the same article. Without this module, the second to save either overwrites the first or gets "The content has been modified by another user" and loses their changes. With it, both edit one shared draft, kept on the server as they type: each sees the other's changes, caret and field, and one Save records the work of both.

Documentation: https://janalis.github.io/collaborate/guide/drupal

Features

Shared drafts of content entity forms: nodes, terms, media, block content, users… Text fields, CKEditor 5 fields as rich text (concurrent edits merged, not overwritten), selects, checkboxes, radios, autocompletes, the items of multi-value fields (added, removed, reordered), Paragraphs and the entities Inline Entity Form's simple widget edits. The draft survives a reload or a closed tab. Save goes through the entity form's own validation and submission.
Presence and cursors: the top bar shows who else is on the page; their pointers, carets, selections and the field each one is in are drawn in their color.
Conflict review: when the entity is saved outside the draft (from a browser without JavaScript, say), the draft shows what differs, word by word, and the editor keeps the draft or takes the saved version.
New content drafted together: a new node's form has an invitation link; it is created once, whoever saves it.
Refreshed listings: the content overview, views and entity pages reload when a save elsewhere changes what they show.
Notifications: a bell in the top bar, topics each editor subscribes to, delivered through Drupal's queue, and web push.

Screenshots of each, and how they behave, are in the Drupal guide.

Who it is for

Sites where several people edit content in the administration, on Claro or Gin. The front-end theme is not involved: nothing changes for visitors.

Requirements

Drupal 11.3 or later, or 12, on PHP 8.4+.
MariaDB 10.6+, MySQL 8, PostgreSQL 16+ or SQLite 3.35+.
A hub, which carries the edits between browsers: FrankenPHP's built-in Mercure hub, any Mercure hub, or the module's own WebSocket server (drush collaborate:hub:serve). No Node.js service.
Navigation for the top bar items, or the module's two blocks in the administration theme's header.

Drafts and notifications are stored in the site's own database, in the module's tables. Nothing is sent to a third-party service.

Installation

composer require drupal/collaborate
drush pm:install collaborate

Then:

Name the hub in settings.php (how).
Grant the Collaborate permission (and Receive notifications) to the editors' roles.
Adjust the options at Configuration → Content authoring → Collaborate (/admin/config/content/collaborate).

Until a hub is named, pages render as before and the status report says what is missing.

Limits

Inline Entity Form's complex widget is not shared: the forms it opens are each editor's own.
A field's #states that names another field's item by its position no longer finds it: the items' controls are named by their key.
The administration only: front-end forms are not shared.

Similar modules

Content Lock locks a node while one editor has it open: the others wait. Collaborate lets them edit together.
Autosave Form keeps one editor's unsaved changes. Collaborate keeps a draft shared by every editor of the entity.
Conflict resolves conflicting saves after the fact. Collaborate avoids most of them, and reviews the rest before saving.

Project status

Under active development, released with the janalis/collaborate Symfony bundle it runs on, under the same version. Not yet covered by drupal.org's security advisory policy.
The bundle's code is fully covered by its tests (every statement, and a 100% mutation score), and the module is tested with PHPUnit (unit, kernel and functional, on MariaDB, PostgreSQL and SQLite) and in the browser on Claro.
MIT licensed.

Documentation

Drupal guide: install, the hub, configuration, multi-value fields, Paragraphs, limits.
Online documentation: shared drafts, rich text, cursors and presence, notifications, the WebSocket hub, every configuration option.
Changelog.

Contributing

The module is developed on GitHub, in the drupal/ directory of janalis/collaborate: this repository is split from it, and its releases are tagged from there.

Merge requests opened here are welcome: each one is mirrored to a pull request on GitHub, its commits kept with their authors, and reviewed there. New commits on the merge request update the pull request; when it is merged or closed, the merge request is told and closed. Issues opened here are mirrored as GitHub issues.

janalis / collaborate_drupal

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