I think it would be a very useful feature if content contributors could manually create revisions of items at any time. At the moment, it seems that revisions are only created after an item has been to a publishable=publish state at least once. Say an author has written a first draft of a news article. It isn’t ready to be published, or even submitted for approval by editors. But he wants to store a revision for future reference. Maybe he has written his text and now wants to include some quotes. However, he knows he will not be able to ask the source for permission to use them until tomorrow. If, say there was a right-click menu option in the Content Explorer to “Create revision”, he could use that, then edit again to add the quotes. If, tomorrow, the source tells him he cannot use them, he could revert his article back to the revision before the quotes were added.
Couldn’t you handle this scenario with changes to your business process?
Maybe the authors of the content should get the article approved without the articles published in the text but when they send the article for approval they include a transition note with the quotes included stating, “the quotes will be added pending approval from the source.”
You might even take this a step further and have the quote as a content type and include them in the news story in an inline template. This would allow the document to be approved without the quotes being in a public state, then when they are approved they will appear within the document.
The addition of quotes to news articles was only an example. I can think of many reasons why an author would want to manually create a new revision. Besides, wouldn’t it be nice if the software could be configured to fit each organisation’s business processes, not the other way round.