[Zope-CMF] Re: CVSFolder & CMF

Jonah Bossewitch Jonah Bossewitch" <jonah@abstractedge.com
Wed, 31 Jul 2002 00:24:51 -0400


Steve,

Thanks for getting back to us!  The difficulties we encountered were
complex.

Context in a nutshell: Essentially we have about a half a dozen people
collaborating on a CMF/Plone site.  There are 2-3 developers and 3+
designers working on the project.   The idea of everyone, including the
designers, running their own local zope servers strikes us as an
administrative hassle and an unreasonable burden to place on
non-tech-oriented folks.  Previously, on non-zope projects, we had succeeded
in training our designers to use cvs (using a windows gui client) , and they
have taken well to it.

The products that we develop will be able to be cvs'd normally, outside of
zope.  We would like to be able to take advantage of cvs' collaborative
support to manage multiple developers and designers working on our ZPTs,
DTMLs, skins, and external methods.

We were able to get ZCVSFolder to work (mostly) well on zope primitive
objects.  However, attempts to manage a plain vanilla CMF (1.2) site using
ZCVS proved challenging.  The situation was compounded when we attempted
similar tasks on a plone site...

Some of the problems seemed to stem from the fact that both CMF and plone
introduce pseudo folders which ZCVS does not treat as normal folder objects
(we can get the pickeled version of the _entire_ folder and its subcontents,
but cannot manage the individual objects as distinct entities).
Additionally, the properties on all folders (and this happens on normal zope
folders too) disappear once they come back out of cvs.   This isn't terrible
with normal folders since properties are seldom used, but on CMF folders
make extensive use of them.   So changes or additions to the metadata on
objects are not propagated on a cvs update, introducing a complicate
maintenence situation.

At this point, with the amount of manual fine grained control that will be
required to manage isolated sections of the cmf folder has discouraged us
from using cvs to manage our zope objects.

Do you have suggestions on how we ought to be using this product with CMF?

Thanks again for your time,
Jonah


>Hi Jonah,
>
>Can you give some more clues about the problem? Have you been successful
>with "normal" Zope folders?
>
>thanks,
>-steve

O