Introduction

StagingAddOn is a simple staging and versioning product. This products aims to be an easy-to-install and easy-to-use solution. It allows:

• to have a published version of an item, while working on a new version (located in the same folder). When this new version is published, the old one can be automatically archived (provided your workflow has an 'archive' transition);
• to list versions of a an item;
• to compare two versions of an item, if CMFDiffTool is installed.

Other products (a.k.a. "the big warning section")

Staging and versioning are a very important feature that Plone aims to soon provide out of the box. Until that happens, you may want to use the right product that fits your own needs.

EnSimpleStaging

As of this writing, this product provides advanced staging features, with separate workspaces (this might change in a near future). Might be overkill and/or not simple to use, though. See http://plone.org/products/ensimplestaging.

CMFEditions

As of this writing, this is the preferred way of having multiple versions of a single item in CMF (and thus Plone). Unfortunately, it does not provide any staging feature: it is not possible to work on a version of an item while having another version published. See http://plone.org/products/cmfeditions

StagingAddOn

You did see "Introduction", didn't you ?

There are other products, but either they do not work with Plone 2.1 or I am not aware of them.

New attributes

StagingAddOn adds new attributes to objects.

'_version'

'_version' is the revision number.

'_versions'

'_versions' is a list which contains the UID of all versions of the object. This list is sorted by the creation date. At any time, this list may contain references to objects which does not exist anymore: use the corresponding method of the tool.

'_new_version'

'_new_version' stores the UID of the last version which is currently under work. This UID may reference an object which does not exist anymore: use the corresponding method of the tool.

'_is_a_version_of'

'_is_a_version_of' is stored only in the non-current versions. It is the UID of the canonical version. As above, this UID may reference an object which does not exist anymore: use the corresponding method of the tool.

Notes

For now, StagingAddOn does not provide any rollback feature. It might, in the future, but this is not really the goal of this product.

Credits

This product has been sponsored by Materis. Thanks to them! It has been developped by Pilot Systems.

Damien Baty (Pilot Systems)

original concept, documentation (well...), code.

Souheil Chelfouh (Pilot Systems)

various enhancements.

Gaël Pasgrimaud (Pilot Systems)

various enhancements.