a work on process

Viewing posts tagged: Social Documents

Content management with subversion

10 November 2006 (9:47 am)

By James Stewart
Filed under: Notes, Semantic Web
Tagged: , , ,

A recent comment reminded me of an old entry proposing yet another project I never had time to follow through with: Using Trac and Subversion with Social Documents. The idea there was to make use of subversion’s utility for version control and trac’s existing frontend for browsing that to present versioned documents.

In hindsight, I don’t think trac would actually be a good frontend for this unless the intended audience was entirely techies. Trac works for those of us who use it every day to follow a variety of projects, and its ability to combine a wiki with version control of the ‘official’ versions of documents provides some interesting ideas, but the interface just wouldn’t work.

But even if I’m unlikely to get time to play with it, I’m still interested in the idea of using subversion as the core for content management. It seems a sensible application of “small pieces loosely joined” to use a proven version control system as one layer in a system. So I’ll be interested to follow Bob DuCharme’s work to use subversion for Digital Asset Management in a CMS.

Bob’s looking into svn’s ability to store arbitrary metadata to store RDF relating to each revision and exploring how its hook mechanism an be employed to make it all work. As ever the proof will be in the interface, but the underlying principles definitely deserve exploration.

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Using Trac and Subversion with Social Documents

24 June 2005 (7:50 am)

By James Stewart
Filed under: Notes
Tagged: , ,

As I’ve touched on before, one of the areas I’ve been exploring as part of the Social Documents projects is ways of managing document revisions. With a major United Nations summit coming up in September (and the 60th anniversary of the charter on Sunday) I’d like my UN Charter site to be better equipped to handle any amendments to the charter that might be made, but as more and more public documents come online it will be important to be able to look back through their histories and see how they’ve evolved.

The version management tool of choice for many coders is currently subversion, often coupled with trac for project management. So one avenue of exploration that seemed to make sense was to use that pairing to manage a multi-part document.

In order to get cross-referencing and formatting working, I decided to patch trac so that it would treat source code in the subversion repository as wiki text (a relatively straightforward patch as the system is nice and modular). It’s looking pretty good right now, though as yet I only have the Preamble and Chapter I of the charter in the repository.

What I’ve quickly come to realise is that hacking trac to form a core for a social document system would be a lot of work. The repository browsing is nice, but adding and navigating commenting features would be a fairly substantial amount of work, probably more than writing something from scratch. Using subversion at the core, however, may well be a solid way forward — it just needs the right front-end.

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