[opencms-dev] Develop in a collaborative environment

[Achim Westermann]

Hi Tim, 

I'm not speaking in Rüdiger's or Alkacon's name. Just some thoughts. 

> Also, i am intrigued and would like to as why would you
> not
> use the commercial opencms feature of replication from one server to
> another? So, why would you not replicate your local environment into your
> test environment?

Does not make sense. If there are several developer machines and all would replicate to the test environment there would not be any merging control. 
The way from dev to test is to first synchronize with the versioning system, then build the module with an ANT script and install it on test. 

>From dev to live the commercial n - stage replication could be used. But for a smaller website this is a bit of overhead. If only one or two developers work on code (modules) it's quite easy to move a module from dev to test. The two stage sync feature is more feasible if many editors work on content which has to be revised by responsible guys. They test the content changes on test and - if ok - push the button to have that transferred to live. That is easier for content - testers which do not want to work with scp and module export / import. 
> Once again, it is very insightful to hear that one can manually create a
> zip
> file that will probably be guaranteed to match the module format. 

It is pretty easy to script an ANT target that puts together an existing manifest.xml with content files in a directory structure to a module.zip. Just deflate a module zip file and look at the structure. 

If do not want to change the manifest.xml manually but still want to perform every change just under eclipse a google search for "ANT Eurelis" could help: An ANT task that creates a manifest.xml from some content files in a tree along with their properties in property files. 

kind regards, 

Achim