[opencms-dev] Apply Subversion on OpenCms?

[James Sun]

Hello guys,

We currently maintain a (mainly static) website by storing the pages in 
SVN (similar to CVS) and regularly checking them out onto the webserver. 
This has
some advantages:
- multiple authors can edit pages simultaneously and resolve any 
conflicting edits using SVN's merge functions
- authors can work off-line and check in their changes when back on-line
- version control, with a mature set of tools for looking at version 
history, diffs, who did what, and so on

We want to replace the site with a CMS-based version and are considering 
using OpenCms. The question is: could some content be stored in SVN, in 
order to
get the benefits listed above?

We know OpenCms has its own offline/online work mechanism, which also 
supports version control. But it stores page contents in the DB rather 
than a svn repository. One of the differences between SVN and a standard 
DBMS backend would be that the application would have to allow for a 
merge step when a change is submitted - i.e. when a user commits an edit 
OpenCms would have to query SVN to identify possible conflicts and, if a 
conflict existed, send the page back to the user to edit it. Would that 
be complex? If so, would it be less complex to introduce a new class of 
pages, whose content was stored in SVN?

Cheers

Haotian Sun