Symphony.

I'm a sucker for your interface. I digg it. I just realized, however, you guys could consider adding automatic saving. It could be similar to Google's draft saving or just plain save. This would require a bit of work on the UI side to just either periodically save (including form validation performed -- if invalid don't save) or depending on the input field an automatic save could occur.

This would be ubiquotous in the admin interface. If I'm writing an article I suppose it would be against my advantage if I don't have an optional publish button and it's saving as I'm typing and those reading the article are wondering why the page changes very second. The automatic saving, however, can be advantageous to those that are in a rush and forget to press save.

Similarly, making new sections or working on different parts of the admin. could take advantage of this.

If there is automatic saving then the second step would be to have the changes reflect automatically. This is a bit trickier but you could start by the obvious things. If I am making a new section then the section could appear under the Sections menu. If I update the ordering of the sections, then the order should just naturally update the Sections menu as well.

I guess I'm just suggesting fluid interactivity. Thoughts?

Depending on how you've built your section, usefulness may vary. Case in point, say that you have this field order in your section:

1. Title [Required]
2. Body [Required]
3. Location [Required]

Since all fields are required and the Body is where the author spends most of his time, if he does not fill in other required fields first, the auto save won't ever trigger. So in this instance, the author will need to consciously fill in all the other fields first, then work on the body part.

If I was an author in that instance, if I had to fill in all the required fields first so the system would trigger the auto saving, it would probably be easier if I just author my stuff in a text editor and paste all my data in later.

Of course, the example isn't the greatest. Imagine a section with 12 fields, 5 of it required.

In this case, an auto draft would be useful.

The server is not the right place to store auto-save information because, as you mentioned, there are all sorts of problems involving drafting/incompleteness/validity. Adding this feature would complicate even basic low-level constructs in Symphony.

The right place for auto-saving would be a Google Gears-style client-side cache. I think this would be a great idea for an extension, and would avoid all the problems mentioned above, allow for offline editing, etc. There still is the issue of synchronisation across multiple users/computers, but this problem exists for ordinary saving anyway.