Paul Gillingwater wrote:
> There's an interesting article this week on ZDNet about Web content
> managers, which seems to be the category that Midgard falls into. The
> URL is http://www.zdnet.com/pcweek/stories/news/0,4153,2329627,00.html.
I've looked these through. Some very impressive stuff there.
A few strong points I've noticed:
- Private & public staging areas
- Extensive (multiple-layered) workflow control and notification
- Versioning (with rollback/undo), site checkpointing with rollback
(and tie-in to the staging)
- Integrated searching
- Integrated development environments
Some systems offered a more OO approach to site development, with
less strict ties between components. Midgard components (style/page
elements, pages, articles) are pretty tightly coupled.
The staging area can be done to some extent with inherited styles that
do or don't check for the approval state of an article, but this
doesn't work for the whole site, just the content. Of course, you
could just set up a separate host + style to use the same content
tree, and call that the staging area, but that only works if you're
going for a new approach, not building on an existing deployment.
Workflow is a non-trivial issue of which I know too little to say
'when'.
One can certainly go overboard with this. Anyone who has worked with a
real
workflow product before care to share his/her views?
Versioning on the article level would require some changes to the core,
but can be classified 'doable'. Versioning on the site level can
possibly
be tackled by the packaging/replication functionality. I honestly don't
know how well, though.
Integrated searching is going to be part of Midgard. The only problem
is that if I'm to do it it is going to happen in my Copious Free Time
(in other words, don't hold your breath). But it is not hard,
non-intrusive
to the core, and valuable. Count on it.
The IDE is out of our domain, really. Midgard leans heavily on PHP right
now
but the 2.0 structure makes that less so, making an Perl or Java binding
possible. What would be needed then is an (preferably OSS) IDE for PHP,
Perl or JavaServlets.
> It occurred to me that we could look at some of the features offered by
> such systems, and think about which ones make sense for Midgard -- for
> example, one thing I would like to see is some sort of version control.
> I know the hooks are there for Midgard to do this, but was wondering if
> this is on the development path plan?
The current functionality only records the version number -- it does
not offer functionality to retrieve older versions. A workaround
could be to use reply articles for the article VC archive.
Bye,
Emile
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