Hello Penpot community! I’m glad to see such a promising, much needed FOSS project take shape. It’s already being used for a number of projects by the Blender development team.
Just like for Penpot, community involvement is important for Blender - that includes the design process. How community involvement on Penpot projects can look like is a broad topic and I’d welcome some ideas & suggestions. Let me bring up two specific issues we found.
Granularity of Editing Rights
We would like to invite community members to work on specific Penpot projects, for example to help developing our UI kit. So far, we have one Penpot team for all the collaborative projects. If we add a new team member to work on a specific project, they will get editing rights to all our projects. So we have to be rather careful about who we give editing rights to.
I see a few options on what Penpot could support to address this specific problem:
- Assign individual members to projects.
- Project sharing links with editing rights for just the project.
- Limit which projects can be edited by a project member. (Like a “guest” member?)
- Allow referencing projects by other teams in the own projects board. Similar to Sneak peek: Libraries module at the dashboard, but more customizable I guess? It’s a bit of a workaround and would mean we have to create a number of teams. But maybe that’s something we should do anyway.
- Some kind of fork->merge process, where people just fork a project, do changes and propose them for a merge back into the original project file.
Are there any plans or thoughts about such features?
Version Control / History
Another concrete problem is that Penpot doesn’t seem to track the history of changes. Being able to rollback to earlier versions is an important safety mechanism for team projects, especially if we want to have rather open involvement policy. Are there any plans on this currently?
I’d guess that SVG lends itself well for versioning, since you manage versions as simple text diffs, but what do I know of course 
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Hi @julianeisel !
Somehow Discord flagged your post as spam 
Anyway, that’s fixed now.
First, any mention of Blender at Penpot camp will draw MUCH attention since many of us are Blender users (I used Blender before it was open sourced and I put together some money when the Free Blender campaign was launched by Ton Roosendaal). I mention the Blender community here Not all communities are created equal, what lies ahead for Penpot
Second, your input is quite spot on. Actually, yes, we have plans for editing rights granularity. Our other open source product, Taiga (taiga.io) needs this as it’s about agile project management and team members permissions are key, and we want to bring all that to Penpot too. We recently discussed this, actually, and we’re looking forward to having more options around that, possibly including some “see but don’t touch!” mode.
On the advanced topic of fork/merge, this needs more discussion. We need to understand the process here and what actually belongs to Penpot naturally and what should be part of an external version control system (see also next point). I think I understand what you’re trying to achieve here but I would love to listen to it “live” so happy to have a chat with you any time.
Re: Version Control / History we do have session history (see 03· Workspace basics) but we want to go beyond this and implement some sort of shared “snapshot” mode. This would allow Penpot users (I try to avoid saying Penpot designers because devs are welcome too, much like Blender or Godot) to have the ability to keep a shared history with shared snapshots like what google docs has (git versioning might not be the ideal metaphor here).
SVG does have a ton on potential due to its text nature, you’re absolutely right, and Penpot files are little more than SVG and JSONs in a zip file so we’re on to a great start. Actually, I think @myfunnyandy said this week that the internal capability for this is already built, it’s just a matter of coming up with a great UI (and decide on its priority).
I’d like to ask you a favour. Could we have a glimpse on which Blender teams are using Penpot? It’s a dream use case for us but also we would have a gorgeous #madewithpenpot shot. A Blender UI design within Penpot UI. 
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Hey, thanks for the nice reply. Great to see your enthusiasm
Also great to hear there are further plans for editing rights, seems you guys already have it rather far up in the priority list.
The fork/merge workflow I brought up seems a bit overkill honestly. I just brainstormed openly about possible options, you never know where this leads Doesn’t seem like an attractive solution so far though.
That also sounds great. Reaffirming that Penpot is going in a good direction where real world needs are addressed.
On it! So far its been more of a wireframing and whiteboard tool for us (developers mostly), not for pixel perfect design. We just started working on a UI kit, so there might be more high fidelity design work to share in future.
As wireframing/whiteboard tool it’s incredibly useful for us. That’s how we already used it in the development process of highly anticipated & big Blender features. Penpot can really help developers design too.
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@diacritica hey, could you or somebody else increase the trust level of @dfelinto please? He wrote a #madewithpenpot post but cannot share more than one image in a post. Thanks!
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Done! I put him on level 2 now
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This is wonderful! And your last paragraph is an amazing validation for us, almost quotable to be honest.
So, also for managing expectations. What’s really in the short term is 1.15 with a really nice set of enhancements. Expect that in August and it will probably be a stealth launch but I’ll make sure you know what’s in there when it arrives. THEN we focus on releasing the new in-app onboarding process, which is critical to us to exit this “BETA” status. Very close after that we will have the Layout feature and a new Components system, and then’s when the roadmap starts to look a bit like what you mentioned.
