Odd, I thought I posted to this issue at some point.
Somehow that didn't appear here (I mailed it). I dug
it up from my outbox and will paste it in here.

> Let's track the steps. The use case is, there are a number of
> Silva publications online for the public. Thus they have
> published status, and cannot be renamed or moved. The editor
> wants to restructure the site a bit.

Okay, trying to step back and trying to figure out *when* an
editor is in this situation of restructuring a published site.

The web has the principle that urls should remain as stable
as possible. The stability of urls makes hyperlinking
possible at all; if urls changed too rapidly then the web
couldn't work, as intersite links would be broken too
frequently and bookmarks and search engines constantly
out of date.

Silva's system of not allowing changes to published
documents has two positive benefits:

  * it forces the editor to take a conscious action before
actually breaking urls.

  * the editor cannot break stuff by mistake.

The editor can do two things to actually change urls in a
published site. One is the ridiculously long sequence of
steps that you pointed out. The other option is to make a
copy of the subsite to be reorganized. This copy is
automatically closed. The editor can rearrange this, then
swap out the old site for the new site and then publish
everything in the new site.

Perhaps the copying option would be more appealing if that
approach were more obvious/easy, so we should consider ways
to accomplish this.

Another possibility is that the editor simply doesn't care
about stable urls for one reason of another. This could be
because the site is under rapid development; it has to
remain published so people can already use the data that is
there, but it is expected it'll be reorganized quickly as
well. Going through the hypothetical simplified copying step
would be too much complication in this case (would it be?).

[snip]

> Since I am a Manager, I don't bother with being reminded. I
> punch through to the ZMI (alt-.  ;) and move things around
there, renaming
> at will. 
> 
> However, editors don't have this option. They have to do the
> multi-step process. Isn't it strange that they have the
rights to make
> these changes, but we force them to go through all these
steps?  
> Shouldn't they just be able to do it?

It should definitely be far easier for them to do it than at
present. Would the copying/republishing solution be
sufficient if it were improved in some way? It would cause a
minimal disruption of the site, as the new copy can be fully
reviewed before it is opened. (though there's
the absolute link question; if those are used then a move &
open in the old place is not that simple).

The other alternative would be for them to just be able to
'do it'. I'd prefer it if there were at least one step they
would need to take to get into this 'unsafe changes' mode.
Perhaps they need to press a button and there's some warning
indication while they're in this mode. That way editors are
still prevented from easily making mistakes ('oops, that was
published and I just deleted it!') normally, but when
they are in 'reorganization mode' they can do as they like.