Well, everything seems to be collapsing around our Contribute stuff and I can't seem to figure out what the heck is going on.
First of all: we used to use the Publishing Server, but had to ditch it because it no longer played nice with our LDAP server, and there pretty much was literally no way to fix it from the CPS end. As a result, we moved our sites to a new server and to using the client-only method of administration.
For this problem, we have a site - example.org. There are some people who are administrators and publishers for the whole site. However, we also have writers who should only have access to certain subfolders. How things turned out, we had to create a child connection to get that to work (because giving them only access to a subfolder, and giving them the key for the site at large resulted in the server rejecting their log in).
So we have a key for example.org, keys for example.org/subfolder/ and some people have the Writer key for example.org/subfolder/ and some people have the Admin or Publish key for BOTH example.org and example.org/subfolder/ since I read they had to have both to make sure reviews were treated correctly by the contribute client.
So initially, the writer (who is using Contribute 3.11) created some drafts and send it to the publisher (who is using CS4). However, they couldn't do anything with it because it said that someone else had edited the draft and asks her if she wants to overwrite it. When she says yes, it tells her Access Denies. Litereally the only thing she can do is send it to me (using CS5) and as an administrator (after sending the draft back and forth a couple times) published the page.
However, now we have a new problem: The original Writer, when going to those pages, gets a message saying they can't edit those pages because there are drafts open of them, even though all the drafts have been published. I thought she might still have a local copy, but we couldn't really find anything where the drafts are supposed to be. I even went as far as wiped out the Contribute folders on the server and re-created the connection. Still no dice. Meanwhile, the Publisher has a greyed out Edit button with no message at all.
The writer then sent another page for review. The Publisher got the same "someone else has edited the draft" message, and me as the Administator, when I go to the page, get no message at all that a draft has even been created. I can edit and publish the page at will if I wanted, despite the pending draft.
Just what the heck is going on?
