[Deansatch]

I write a lot of CMS's for my clients and ran into a nasty little problem the other day. When I spent ages creating and populating a page, I click on "save & publish" but the server had a slight moment of downtime so I got the page load error. I clicked refresh and was presented with the blank forms. All my work was gone.

Is there a way of preventing this somehow?

[smithygotlost]

not really, this is a problem with most things unless and it might be a bit.... but hey

make an ajaxx for your forms so as you fill them in onfocus out it sends that field to the db. however this is a bit drastic for the site to only go down once in a blue moon

sorry to say its just one of those things, best way type it all in word then paste it and submit that way it goes wrong you just paste it again
Good luck
Mike

[Thyrosis]

I suppose that depending on the browser you could click 'return' rather then 'refresh', as sometimes the input field values are still there. But you can't really tell people that when the page won't load, so that doesn't work either

[=OTS=G-Man]

Google chrome is good at saving form data. Ive had times where ill submit and server not be there, and when I hit the back button, it takes me to the form and re-populates it, so i can try submitting again.

[wirehopper]

One very good approach is to write the content in a text file, save it, then paste it into the CMS through the browser.

Good for all sorts of things when you're investing a lot of time in text.