Previewing many user's changes

[marcus]

Is it possible to preview changes made by 2 or more people at once? Part of the workflow I'm looking to implement requires some artists providing some media files and developers supplying some code in their own separate sandboxes, which seen together makes sense, but when viewed separately isn't relevant. I don't want things pushed through to staging until after they're approved, but at the same time I can't figure out any other way for things to be previewed including the changes of other people. Ideas?

[kvc]

Marcus:


Yes … in 2.2 (currently BETA), we've added GUI support (at long last) for creating layered directories. 

Your artists can work in their own web project with their own delegated admin (content manager) and their own sandboxes, staging area, review processes, etc.

In your artists' staging area, you can create a layered directory that maps the staging area used by your developers.  This means that anytime new code is completed and checked-in, your artists always have access to it.

Similarly, your developers can map the artists staging area to a particular directory in their own staging area.  When new graphics are completed, the developers always have access to it.

If your artists and designers want to collaborate together at the same time, you can also take your current web project, branch it (using 2.2's new use of AVM branching), and give your artist and designer a common shared staging area where they can collaborate together over some period of time and update the site.  When they get to a known good snapshot, you can sync the branched web project staging store (some version of it) with the parent web project.  This sync back (a branch merge) will require use of our underlying AVMSyncService API.  If you want to avoid using this API, you can map a sandbox on your parent web project as a CIFS drive and configure a file-system deployment to incrementally push modified assets back to the parent.  Kinda not ideal to go outside  the system only to re-sync another project within the system, but essentially achieves the same results as AVMSyncService.


Kevin

[marcus]

Ahh good to hear, I hadn't checked 2.2 just yet and was hoping the stuff I'd read about branching would be in some way beneficial. I'll check it out.

[marcus]

Have just had a quick look, and while I can see how it's possible to sort of do what I want, it's not quite. The need to have a separate web project is a bit counter-intuitive, and the syncing back to the base project would need to be managed by workflow, as the whole point is so that separate users' changes can be previewed and approved in the context of those other changes. I'll take a deeper look and see how the business process side of things would fit with creating separate web projects for development tasks, and maybe some customisation to be able to 'workflow' a branched webproject back into the the baseline.

[marcus]

Having spoken more about what is desired and potential alternatives, another option that came up is to create a new sandbox in a webproject on demand, that multiple users have permission to modify; the, when submitting content from their own sandbox, a user could specify to submit to a particular sandbox (not necessarily the staging sandbox). Does the current AVM architecture support this kind of functionality? This is partly related to my other thread about content dependencies (http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=12131); it wouldn't force a dependency between content submitted by one user and images provided by another, but would at least provide a contextual preview before content made it to staging.

[kvc]

Marcus:

Sure … the fact that's there one staging sandbox is just an artifact of our default production model and web client implementation.  The server supports a much richer model.

You can have any number of "staging" sandboxes.  Each sandbox is just it's own avmstore.  If you do create a new "staging" sandbox, you'll want to update our submit workflow
to allow a user to select which staging sandbox to sync after review … and you'll need to provide some custom action to sync that staging sandbox with the default one to enable
deployment.

That's a bit of customization, but you should be able to do that readily with the Javascript API and AVMRemote (whose services you can also fully expose via the Javascript API following
the instructions on the wiki).


Kevin