Areas (Authoring, Staging, Live)

This section refers to areas as abstract concepts, not necessarily modeled as separated content areas.

Requirements:

• independent from each other (changes to /authoring/foo don't influence staging/foo)
• self-contained
  

See also:

• http://www.mail-archive.com/sling-dev@incubator.apache.org/msg05812.html (Felix Meschberger from the Sling team in favor of the multi-workspaces approach)
  

Options:

Workspaces

Advantages:

• Physically separated nodes with same UUID possible ("corresponding nodes" concept)
• Separated, independent
• Self-contained
• Easy migration to an environment with separate authoring/staging/live repository servers + replication
  

Issues:

• Changing the site structure requires to remove the involved nodes from all non-authoring areas (like now)
• Copying access control definitions?
• Node.update(workspace) copies the subtree:
  • either nodes must be kept in a flat structure (no hierarchy)
  • or nodes and properties must be copied manually
  • or use referenceable child nodes
    

/de
  /foo < mix:referenceable
    /lenya:document < mix:referenceable
      /jcr:content = "Hello"
    /bar

Publish single node:

getItem("/de/foo/lenya:document").update("staging");

Publish subtree:

getItem("/de/foo").update("staging");

Separated Areas in a Single Workspace

Advantages:

• Simple access
  

Issues:

• Copying access control definitions required
• Different UUIDs:
  • Either rewrite links
  • Or don't use JCR UUIDs but custom String properties for UUIDs
    

Separated Areas in a Single Node

Example:

  /foo
    /lenya:authoring
      /jcr:content = "Hello"
    /lenya:staging
      /jcr:content = "Hello"
    /lenya:live
      /jcr:content = "Hello"
    /bar
      /lenya:authoring
      /…

Advantages:

• Simple
• Site structure can be changed without removing staged or published content
  

Issues:

• Areas not self-contained
• No direct URI-to-path mapping possible
• Changes to site structure would be visible in all areas immediately
  

Labelled Versions

• Issues:
  • All changes applied immediately, without calling Session.save()
  • Access control to version history?
    

Submit:

VersionHistory history = node.getVersionHistory();
Version base = node.getBaseVersion();
boolean move = true;
history.addVersionLabel(base.getName(), "staging", move);

Obtaining live version:

VersionHistory history = node.getVersionHistory();
Node liveVersion = history.getVersionByLabel("live");
Node liveNode = liveVersion.getChild("jcr:frozenNode");