CMFEditions 1.0beta1 (Beta release) (Jun 25, 2006)

This is not a final release. Experimental releases should only be used for testing and development. Do not use these on production sites, and make sure you have proper backups before installing.

First beta release of CMFEditions. Next release will be a release candidate.

For additional information about this project, please visit the overview page .

Available downloads

Release Notes

Tested with	Plone 2.1.2
State	Beta release
License	GPL
Release Manager	Grégoire Weber

Target Audiences

• Plone Integrators: You need to version content in your Plone site. CMFEditions is nearly production ready. Actually there are users using pre 1.0alpha3 svn checkouts in production.
• Plone Developers: You've special use cases to fullfill. CMFEditions has been designed for extensibility and has well defined extension API's. Please contact us over the mailing list.

State

With CMFEditions 1.0beta1 we *continue stabilizing* the current feature set. No new feature will be added till the 1.0final.

A Note if you like to upgrade from an Alpha

With the 1.0beta1 the storage layout has slightly changed and migration code was added. Unfortunately the migration doesn't work correctly. So for the moment users with productive data using an 1.0alpha or earlier shall not upgrade to this beta release! You have to wait for a future release (probably after the 1.0 final).

Features

• Out of the box versioning for Plone 2.1.x (standard content types)
• support for folderish content types
• basic support for Archetypes content types
• basic purging support (tested for non folderish and non referenced content types only, enabling is still dden in the ZMI)
• strong architectural support for very complex content types (this was the primary goal from the beginning. Plone product expert knowledge necessary.
• replaceable storage (the storage API is quite simple)
• Translated into French, German, Danish, Polish
• ...

For additional details please consult the README.txt in the products root folder.

Credits

CMFEditions would not have happened without:

• the Goldegg Sprint 2003 which braught me together with Alberto to start with CMFEditions (which was a this time a staging solution)
• Alberto Berti with his knowledge of Zope Version Control and writing the archetypes support
• Oxfam which helped resurrecting CMFEditions after a year of inactivity
• The reflab guys (Vincenzo, Francesco, Riccardo) who organized the resurrecting, organized the Pisa Sprints and have also done most work on the user interface, adding tests, fixing bugs, etc.
• Alec Mitchel who added versioning policies and kept alive CMFEditions in 2005 while I had to focus on different things
• Grégoire Weber (me) who did the initial coding and is the responsible for the architecture and fundamental concepts
• Sune Broendum Woeller for fixing bugs in the AT support
• Francesco Ciriaci for providing the documentation on plone.org
• Robert Rottermann for sponsoring purge support
• Duncan Booth, Sylvain Thenault, Tomek Meka, Varun Rastogi, Rob Miller

It was a nice experience that from time to time people just started trying out CMFEditions adding missing features and doing bug fixing.

Contributors:

alecm, azy, duncan, ilbestio, gregweb, rlemmi, rafrombrc, sunew, syt, tomek, varun, vds
(Please file me your name and login name if I forgot you.)

Sponsors

Parts of the Product development were sponsored. The sponsors will be dignified in the rc and final release.

Change log

Bugs fixed

- Fixed previewing (retrieving) files and images. [gregweb]

- Security Policy was for ``manage_setPolicies`` but the method name 
  was ``manage_setTypePolicies``. Corrected. [gregweb]

- The storage now stores ZVC's ``__vc_info__`` for every version 
  avoiding wrong information is attached to a working copy when 
  previewing a version. Fix for ToDo.txt item #48. [gregweb]

- Replaced all occurences of ``rollback`` with ``revert``. Brought into
  sync internal names with UI. Rollback may suggest a transaction 
  rollback which is something different. Including i18n label
  ``label_rollback`` which is now ``label_revert``. Added backwards 
  compatibility code for configuration. Translations not updated.
  [gregweb]

- Minor refactorings of the version history view. Notably replaced
  ``(show below)`` by ``preview`` without jumping to the preview target
  on the page by default. Instead the link name of the previewed version
  changes to ``jump down``. [gregweb]

- The storage is now more immune against non int selectors. [gregweb]


Features Added

- The approximate size of a version is now recorded also at save time
  (and calculated at storage migartion).
  [gregweb]

- Added size information to storage statistics ZMI view [gregweb]

- Added German translations [gregweb]

- Added Polish translations provided by Piotr Furman [Piotr Furman, gregweb]

- ``RetainWorkflowStateAndHistory`` now adds the ``review_state`` to the
  ``sys_metadata`` at save time because at retreive time the workflow tool 
  picks the working copies state. I didn't find any other way to do it 
  without digging into workflows internals (which would have been a bad 
  idea anyway). Had to extend the ``IModifier.ISaveRetrieveModifier``
  interface to allow a modifier enhance ``sys_metadata`` at save time. 
  [gregweb]

- Added purge support [gregweb]:

  - Enhanced storage API with a ``purge`` method that inevitabely
    removes a version from the history. See added ``IPurgeSupport``
    and ``IPurgePolicy`` interfaces.
  - Purging raises an exception if no purge policy is installed. This
    will avoid a lot of future tracker items caused by people having
    removed the purge policy but nevertheless providing purge support 
    to users. The reason is that the archivist and repo layer can't 
    handle yet the empty placeholder object beeing returned by the 
    storage for the purged version. This rule may be relaxed in future 
    versions if the archivist and repo layer support handling of those 
    empty placeholder objects.
  - The UI doesn't expose manual purge functionality. Through the ZMI a
    number n may be configured representing the maximum number of
    version per content item that have to be preserved. Older ones are
    automatically purged from the storage at save time.
  - There is a new purge permission that may be used to restrict purging
    to special roles if necessary (applicable to manual purging only).
  - On the repo layer (``portal_repository``) retrieving an object or 
    iterating over the history always returns a valid (unpurged) 
    version. The returned object may be a substitute. Two numbering 
    schematas exist. Numbering counting purged versions and not 
    counting purged versions (passing True or False to ``countPurged``).
    The default numbering schema is ``countPurged=True``. The UI 
    history onyl shows unpurged versions (``countPurged=False``).
  - If the storage is asked to retreive a removed version it may be
    instructed to return a substitute for the removed version. The
    substitution policy itself is implemented in the new purge policy
    tool. This strategy allows to keep most purge implementation 
    details out of the upper layers (archivist, modifiers, repository).
  - The new purge policy tool may be instructed to only keep n versions 
    of a content item. Thus at save time the oldest version is purged 
    if the save operation would result in more than n version reside in 
    the storage.
  - The new purge policy tool substitutes a removed version with the
    next older version. If no other version is available the next 
    newer is used as substitute. If none is available ... well this 
    isn't yet tested :-)
  - The archivist and storage may be asked to also retreive the empty
    placeholder of a purged version. This functionality is yet exposed 
    to the repo layer. This may change in a future release.
  - Added ``isValid`` method on the vdata object that allows to ask if 
    the retrieved object it is valid or not (empty placeholder object 
    or a real version).

- At save time a version aware reference to the parent node is saved
  also. Without it would be very ineffective or even impossible to 
  find out the parents which potentially would prevent adding usefull
  features like retrieving the a whole site from one object in the 
  tree. [gregweb]

- The histories default order has changed: It now returns the newest 
  version as first item and the oldest as last item. The old behaviour
  is still available by passing ``oldestFirst=True``. [gregweb]

- Inserted the ``oldestFirst`` parameter before the already existing
  ``preserve`` parameter. This will cause changes of 3rd party products
  that are using ``preserve`` (None know at the moment, it's better to
  change now than later). [gregweb]

- Added two new i18n labels: ``label_preview_version_below``, 
  ``label_preview_version`` (no translations yet) [gregweb]

- Renamed i18n label: ``label_show_below`` to ``label_preview_version_link``
  (updated labels in po-files but not the translations) [gregweb]


Internal Changes

- Now save all metadata also in shadow storage. But currently on retrieve 
  the metadata is still feteched from the ZVC storage. [gregweb]

- Added migration code for 1.0alpha3 --> 1.0beta1 storage migrations
  [gregweb]

- Adding purge support caused heavy refactoring the version storage.
  ZVC is still used to store the contents history but now additional 
  data is stored in a parallel shadow storage. The layout of the data
  in the ZVC didn't change, only ZVC and purge related metadata has 
  been added to the parallel shadow storage. [gregweb]

- Garbage collected a lot of code that was commented out, outdated 
  triple-X's and items in ``ToDo.txt``. [gregweb]

- The storage tests now tests ZVCSTorageTool only once and additionally
  tests the dummy memory storage. This was the intended behaviour but
  a bug prevented running the tests with the dummy storage and instead
  run the tests with ZVCStorageToll twice. [gregweb]