sandbox changelists

[evan_kairuz]

Currently Alfresco allows one sandbox per project per user.
Is there in the near future going to be a solution in Alfresco WCM where instead of having just 1 sandbox per project per user, there would be some kind of changelist functionality.

I require some something similar to having multiple sandboxes for any single user in a web project - each sandbox for that user would be a separate set of files
(not necessarily every file in that webproject - just ones the user would place in it) - and also the ability to submit the changes for those individual changelists
instead of only having the option to either submit your full sandbox of have to go through every file selecting/deselecting files for submission (which is time consuming when you have many files to submit)

After having spent a lot of time on installing and configuring the Alfresco Community Edition I would have to have my work scrapped due to not being able to cater for this requirement of the users.
If there were a way for me to facilitate this requirement my company would be very likely to purchase the enterprise edition of this software.

Thanks for any help that you can offer.

Evan

[mrogers]

In the medium term for Project Swift there are plans for "work packages" which are sort of what you require.  

But if you want to use AVM then the model is one sandbox per user per web project.   An easy work-around would be to have muliple accounts for each user.

[evan_kairuz]

Thanks for the response…

I did consider that as a workaround where id give the fe users access to create new accounts for seperate sandboxes which could be used as changelists…
However this isnt really an option because on of the requirements was single sign-on which we met using the kerberos authentication with ad.

I hope in the future changelist functionality is included. While Alfresco is seen as a CMS is obviously has versioning capabilities so hopefully one day changelists will be included in those capabilities.

Thanks again for the prompt response.

Evan

[evan_kairuz]

One further question.

I was thinking of trying to hack up a solution where I would create stores which would act as versions of another store and used as a changelist.
Messy but potentially could work.

The problem I am having is when I use the AVM api to create a store how do I get the store to show up in CIFS? (our users would like to use CIFS to edit website source files directly on the repository)

Evan

[mrogers]

If you want to resort to coding it yourself then I'm sure its not too much work to create multiple author sandboxes as per your requirements.   There was a re-factoring in 3.1 that makes the sandbox creation trivial.   The only thing you will need to tease out are the permissions for your new sandbox.  You may even find TODO statements pointing the way in the code …

One of the bigger pieces of work with implementing multiple author sandboxes would be to allow Alfresco Explorer to switch between the different sandbox context because its currently only expecting one author sandbox,  however if you are working through CIFS then that does not matter.