Versioning

Versioning is the capability to audit the changes made to a website and to use the audit trail for various restore, rollback and recovery operations.

This feature will be implemented in several stages, depending on user reaction. The first stage - Basic versioning - will deliver only message auditing and restore.

There are 3 levels of user interface to versioning - what's seen by the server administrator in the Frontier controlpanel, as seen by an Individual Managing Editor within manilaFixer and the end user interface.

The audit trail is kept in separate guest databases - the versionlogs - which contain the changes for all websites made in one day. After midnight, a new versionlog is created in the ops folder within the guest databases folder and its name contains the date. The audited changes are linked together in chronologically ordered list which can cross multiple versionLogs. If an intermediate versionlog is removed or renamed, the chain is broken. So the ultimate limit to the number of versions that can be restored is the number of versionlogs the server administrator chooses to retain in the ops folder.

The auditing of messages saves the whole message table, this means that plugins that add data to the message table such as manilaFixer and Metadata are also automatically audited.

Versioning cannot work without patches to the Manila application, manilaFixer will apply the necessary patches at the request of the server administrator.