As I understand it, Radiant doesn’t seem to support page versions and
comments for the page versionsdirectly… is there any extension that
does? It seems that it should be easy enough to have support for
comments about the different page versions. That would allow me to add
something like:
RECENT CHANGES
Version 8: Sep 12, 2007 - Added detailed explanation for Installation.
Version 7: Sep 10, 2007 - Minor changes; corrected punctuation errors.
Version 6: Sep 2, 2007 - Global revision change.
[Click here for earlier changes]
The comments can be done by adding a ‘has_many CommentsAbtversions’ to
the Page and then adding a small text input that allows the comment to
be input.
Q1: In an extension, how do I tell the difference between a ‘Save’ and
‘Save & Continue Editing’ - I thought it may be better to save comments
only when one does a ‘Save’ as against when he does a ‘Save & Continue
Editing’.
But I’m a bit more hesitant about how to actually add in the versions
themselves without changing the page rendering system too much.
I’m wondering with facets maturing if this is more feasible now than
it was then?
The problem I still see is more of a conceptual one: what I (and I
think you) want is a history of changes at the Page level. However,
changes are done at the PagePart level. But keeping a version history
for each page part separately wouldn’t make sense to the end user, and
it probably wouldn’t help admins either.
Also, version control is a solved problem (or at least one with a lot
of good work already put in), whereas versioning inside of a
relational database is a little tougher and solutions tend to be more
one-off (at least in my experience).
Alternatively, something I’ve been toying with (and I’d love to get
feedback) would be to use a variation of the import/export extension
to serialize the page tree (or a subtree of it) and then put that tree
in version control. I was thinking of creating directories for pages
and representing each part as a file within that directory (instead of
the single file format that Import/Export does, so that changesets
will be more meaningful). Reverting would be a matter of loading a
previous revision into the database (or you could keep other revisions
in separate databases).
Some pros would be:
We don’t have to make structural changes to pages or page_parts
We don’t have to reinvent the wheel
We can use proven tools that already work with repositories, such as
a) Capistrano for deploying from an internal staging server to a
production one,
b) Meld (or any other diff tool) for viewing diffs
Cons:
If you actually want the revision data to be viewable, that might
take a little bit of work to get it from the version control system to
Radiant (I think it’s possible though)
Database reload time when moving to different revisions will
probably be high. There would probably be an easy way to only load
changed pages based on the changeset, which would cut down on this, at
least for moving forward in the history.
Regarding editing the layouts and copies etc… in your browser, if
any of you guys are on OS X and use TextMate, you can hit CTRL-CMD-E
and the text area will open up in TextMate. You can then make your
edits and hit CMD-S and boom, it saves it back to your browser
window. Pretty slick. I think you need Safari 3 (WebKit and the new
OmniWeb nightlies work too) for this…
Now, this is no substitute for a real remote editor but if you all
hold on just a bit longer, it is possible something like a RPC blog
editor could show up as an extension…
You know, I just had another idea. Instead of constantly
import/exporting, if the database could be represented as a filesystem
live, synchronization problems would disappear. For this I was
originally thinking of FUSE (and MacFUSE), as _why demonstrated here:
Unfortunately, this leaves out our Windows friends and anyone who
doesn’t quite trust the maturity of the project yet.
Then it hit me: WebDAV. Finder supports it, and I think a number of
the other OS’s support it in their file viewers. Overall, it’s much
more simple to deploy. There’s even a Rails plugin for it:
I do like your idea. I have been thinking on something similar in
the past. My idea was more general, like writing a backend to sqlite3
so DB tables and rows are written directly to individual files, and
organized in directories as you comment. This idea is too ambitious,
and i don’t think that i will find the time and motivation to work on
it. Your view of the problem is more simple and focused on Radiant.
The versioning is also painful since all the stuff is in the DB.
Now i use sqlite3 as much as i can, mainly because all the DB is in a
single file and i can store it in the repository too. I do diffs on
dumps of the DB. Not perfect but practical.