Phriction User GuidePhabricator User Documentation (Application User Guides)
Construct a detailed written history of your civilization.
Overview
Phriction is a wiki. You can edit pages, and the text you write will stay there. Other people can see it later.
Phriction documents are arranged in a hierarchy, like a filesystem. This can make it easier to keep things organized and to apply policy controls to groups of documents.
Policies
Documents and policies in Phriction are hierarchical, similar to a filesystem. For example, a document called "Zebra Information" may be located at /zoo/animals/zebra/.
To view a document in Phrction, you must first be able to view all of its ancestors. So a user can only see Zoo → Animals → Zebra Information if they can see the pages Zoo and Zoo → Animals.
This allows sections of the wiki to be restricted by applying a restrictive policy to the parent (or grandparent) document. For example, if you apply a restrictive view policy to the Zoo page, it will implicitly apply to all sub-pages, including Zoo → Animals → Zebra Information.
Versions and Drafts
Document content is tracked with linear version numbers: version 1, version 2, version 3, and so on. Each time a page is edited, a new version of the page is created.
You can View History to review older versions of a page and see how it has changed over time (and who has changed it).
When you visit a particular document, you are normally shown the most recent version of that document. For example, if there are 17 versions, you'll see version 17.
Likewise, when you edit a document using Edit Document → Save and Publish, your changes are published immediately. If there were previously 17 versions, your new changes will become version 18 and visitors to the document will begin seeing version 18.
If you want to edit a document without publishing the changes right away, you can use Edit Document → Save as Draft instead. This will still create a new version 18, but it won't change which version users see when they visit the document: they'll still see version 17 (the last published version).
You (and other users) can continue editing the draft by using Edit Document. (Once a document has an unpublished draft, editing will stay in draft mode.)
Once you're satisfied with your changes, use Publish Draft to make your changes the current visible version of the document that users see by default when they visit it.
If you made a mistake and published something you didn't intend to, you can navigate back to an older version of the document and use Publish Older Version to change the current visible version of the document to some older version.
Note that draft versions are still normal versions of the document: they are not private, they can not be deleted, other users can see them if they can see the document, and they will eventually become a standard part of the document history. The only private parts of drafts are: editing a draft does not generate a feed story; and users won't see draft content by default when viewing a document.
Drafts may be a good fit if you are:
- working on changes over time; or
- starting with a rough change and refining it in several iterations; or
- collaborating with others on a change; or
- sharing changes before they're published to get feedback.