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.