CMS 2005: Point-In-Time Structural Versioning
In many situations it is useful to be
able to re-trace the changes made to a piece of content. A common reason for
wanting to retrace the history of a document is to find why and by whom a
particular change was made. However there can also be other reasons why the
history of a piece of content needs to be traced – for example, in an
interactive publishing scenario, where libel of other legal action is taken against
a publisher, it becomes necessary to verify the exact configuration of the
contested content at the relevant time.
The traditional approach taken to solve
versioning requirements has been to associate a list of earlier versions with
each document. However, this approach has a number of problems. For example, usually
in such systems once a document has been deleted, it then becomes inaccessible
and its version history lost (except by way of restoring a backup archive,
which is an administrator-level job that may also require re-configuration of
the software installation).
Another problem is that although such
systems maintain the history of documents, they do not maintain the history of
the categorical system in which they are stored. However, in sophisticated
content management applications, where content categorization plays a crucial
role, this means that the information that gives context to the content is
being lost. Such information is crucial in determining the applicability of
syndication rules, and therefore the destination websites at which content has
appeared, and furthermore sophisticated websites will often be written in such
a way that their structure replicates the categorical structures created within
the content management system.
System 7 CMS solves these problems by
augmenting traditional version lists with an innovative system called
“point-in-time structural versioning” (PITSV). PITSV enables users to specify,
for an entire content store, a point-in-time to which it should revert (for the
purposes viewing rather than modification purposes). This enables them to
examine the state of any content item at the chosen point in the past, and also
to examine the state of any other items that existed at that time together with
the overall organizational and structural context in which the item was held
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