to let us concentrate on other things, that in longer perspective are more needed and will be useful for more users.

I agree. Drafts will allow me to write blog posts early but not publish (save) them until I'm ready. It'd also work well for the official wikidot blog, for the same reason.

Then there's a whole range of similar (but not blog-related) uses I can think of for my community website…
… so if I have several uses for this, others sure do as well!

I was under the impression that the whole point of drafts… is that it does not appear in the history. Therefore that wouldn't be a problem (assuming that I am correct).

Nice. Just one minor bug….

When the pop-up opens asking you if you want to edit the draft, it does so close to the top of the page, and the page scrolls up to show it. When the pop-up closes the page needs to be scrolled back down to the action-area.

The first page I tried this on was a longer one and I could not see the "Draft Exists" message without scrolling the page up. I think I would like to see the message pop open right over the editor's text box.

Cool feature though! Thanks for getting this done.

Works much better now. Thanks!

If you Save your page, any drafts are lost. I have only tested it with specifically saving a draft and then cancelling. Upon return to editing, you get presented with the option to load the draft or the previously saved page.

I was thinking that I might prefer if saving a draft exited editing mode. I see no benefit to having a draft saved if it's going to disappear once the page is saved, but maybe I'm missing something too. It might be useful to always have access to the most recent draft that was saved.

Based on EricT's post below, I'm pretty sure I've figured out why it wasn't working during my tests. I was experimenting with a new page, which apparently isn't supported.

There goes my plan to occasionally write blog posts as a draft before publishing them…

Edit: Now that I'm editing an actual page I see a "Save Draft" button. I had assumed that it was automatic and kicked in if the tab was closed before saving.

There goes my plan to occasionally write blog posts as a draft before publishing them…

I agree this would be a great use case for drafts. I can also see how this might be tricky to implement. Maybe a list of "New page" drafts in Site Manager would be a good place to find them for pages that haven't been published yet. Then again, that would lock out users who have create page privileges but don't have privileges to access Site Manager.

Part of Pieter's original wish was:

It also means other people can contribute to your draft version of the page before you publish it live.

This part was not really implemented. It would be cool if we could create a draft and save it before publishing Rev 0.

If a user accesses a page that hasn't been published, but has a draft, then a popup box similar to what we get now could notify the user a draft exists and prompt to edit the draft (if permissions allow it).

Yes, I agree. This was what I thought drafts was going to do.

Just to pop in another quick word: This feature is extremely useful already as it is now, so I'd like to thank Wikidot for implementing it (time well spent).

However, it's not quite what we expected and could be so much more useful ;-) The issue is finding a way to handle drafts for pages that don't exist yet.