CMFEditions provides versioning in Plone.
- It works out of the box.
- It's higly extensible for specific use cases.
Out Of The Box Experience
-------------------------
Versionable content items edit views now allows saving a version on save
(automatically or manually). The version history may be accessed quickly from
the view view.
Versionable content types also have an additional tab with version related
functionality:
- save new version
- preview an old version
- retrieve an old version (replacing the current state in the tree)
- diffing versions
A content panel allows configuring the versioning policy by content type:
- enable or disable versioning
- auto-versioning on save
- auto-versioning on retrieve
By default the contents of a folder is versioned independently of the folder.
This may be changed through the ZMI and for specific cases on python level.
Basic support for Archetypes references is built in.
The current strategy is to save everything of the content item (incl. security
information, workflow state, etc.). On retrieve some of these information are
filtered out. This policy may completely be changed depending on specific needs
(see modifiers below).
Extensibility
-------------
CMFEditions was from the beginning developed with extensibility in mind.
A handful of tools provide the whole functionality:
- repository layer: This is the public main API. The repository layer
cares about recursive storing and retrieving of content items from/to
Zope 2's Object File System (OFS).
- archivist layer: It knows how to clone content items. The
archivist "is Mr. Pickle".
- modifiers: They're invoked by the archivist and know what to clone.
This the main customization point. A modifier knows about what
information on an object is a reference and if the referenced object
has to be versioned also.
- storage: Is responsible of storing content items versions in a
history. The current storage implementation is a ZODB storage (it
uses Zope Version Control Product from ZC). Other storages may be
written (svn, file based, xml based, etc.). The storage API is quite
simple and the storage implementation doesn't have to care about
reference stuff as this is already done by the upper layers.
- purge policy: The purge policy is called on every save operations
and has full control over the version to save and the whole history.
The current implementation may be configured to only hold the n
current versions by purging the older versions from the repository.
This functionality is by default disabled. It may be disabled through
the ZMI. You should take care when you're saving objects with a lot
of interrelations. Purging functionality is quite new!
Additional Documentation
------------------------
A couple of presentations and ReSt documents may be found in
documentation package that has to be downloaded separately (or the
doc folder of CMFEditions).
The CMFEditions team also started adding documentation in the download
area of plone.org.
You're welcome to help out.
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