Versioning Contents

How to manage different versions of a same content (core versioning and language versioning)

Note:

Contents can be versioned in 2 ways: pure versioning to allow working on different versions of the same content and language versioning to allow to work on 2 different translations of the same content. To clarify:

• the word "version" or "core version" is used to talk about a version of a content
• the word "language" or "language version" is used to talk about a translation of a content

Needs and Requirements:

1. ensure BC with CMS API
2. contents can be translated in several languages (this is I18N), each language being versioned too
3. contents can have multiple versions, only one can be marked as current for each language
4. each version can have a status (deleted, draft/being edited, for approval, approved, published, archived)

Versioning Process

When we create a new content a first version is automatically created. Saving the content will preserve the same version number. When we want to work on a new version, we should duplicate the current version of the content and save it as the n+1 version. For a content to be available on frontend it should be published (status) and marked as current (is_current).

Proposed DB Design

content_version table

Name	Definition
content_version_id	int(11) NOT NULL
content_id	int(11) NOT NULL
version	smallint(6) NOT NULL default('1')
is_current	tinyint(1) NOT NULL default('0')
language_id	smallint(6) NOT NULL
status	smallint(6) NOT NULL
created_by	int(11) NOT NULL
date_created	datetime NOT NULL
updated_by	int(11) NOT NULL
last_updated	datetime NOT NULL

content table

Name	Definition
content_id	int(11) NOT NULL
created_by	int(11) NOT NULL
date_created	datetime NOT NULL
updated_by	int(11) NOT NULL
last_updated	datetime NOT NULL

attribute_data table

Name	Definition
attribute_data_id	int(11) NOT NULL
content_version_id	int(11) NOT NULL
attribute_id	int(11) NOT NULL
value	text NULL