You can now resolve editing conflicts in GitBook!
We’re dedicating this to all of you who are collaborating intensely on your documentation. We are pleased to announce that GitBook will now let you resolve all editing conflicts neatly. You can be relieved from the fear of losing changes whenever you and your peer change the same piece of content.
Conflicts happen
GitBook embraces an asynchronous workflow for writing documentation. We believe this workflow gives you the best control and let you organize your teamwork tidily. Having the best level of control means you sometimes need to reconcile parallel changes made by different parties. This is called resolving conflicts. Conflicts in GitBook typically happen when two people edit the same draft, or when someone tries to publish a draft after the published version was edited.
So far, GitBook was doing its best to handle conflicts automatically, but at some point it had to make compromises. This resulted in some changes being ignored sometimes. The changes were saved to the revision history, but would not make it to the published version, and you had to redo these changes manually, which is irritating.
Introducing GitBook’s conflict resolution workflow
Starting today, if you try to save or publish a draft, and the changes you made conflicts with changes made by others, you will be asked to resolve those conflicts. Resolving conflicts means integrating your individual changes with the ones made by others. Only the places that present a conflict have to be dealt with. All you have to do is to pick one version or the other, and sometimes merge pieces of text together.
In most cases, the number of conflicts will be low and this should be an easy task, so no worry! Once all conflicts are resolved, you’re free to go and publish the final version.
We know conflicts in GitBook were a great source of frustration for a lot of you, so we really hope this new feature will fill you with joy.
Now get pumped up and ready to scare all them conflicts away!
Feel free to ping us at support@gitbook.com if you have any feedback. 👋
