Tutorial 2 - Revisions and Version Control

Revision Process / Version Control

CMS content projects often change multiple pages, media items, menus and sitemaps.

To support this workflow, the revision system in jsHarmony lets users group the changes together, so they can be reviewed and published in one batch.

There are 5 steps to the jsHarmony CMS Revision Process:

jsHarmony CMS Revision Process
1. Clone a Release to create your local revision
2. Make changes in your local revision
3. Submit for Publish Review when changes are complete
4. Publisher will Review and Approve to merge the changes into a Release
5. Publisher will publish the Release

Revision Process Walk-through

First, clone the Release.  Usually you'll have just one Release, but in some situations, you might have different Releases for different languages, or different geographic areas

Enter a name, press the submit button, and now the new Revision is checked out.

Add a Home Page to the site, and double-click to edit.  Make a few changes and save.

Back in the Sitemap, click on the Home Page and select Revision History to see a list of all the changes to a page.

We can click on the Revision name on top to see the Revision summary.  This provides a list of all the files that have been changed.

Finally, all changes are complete, click "Submit for Publish Approval".

At this point the publisher will now see the new revision on their "Revisions waiting for approval" grid

The publisher can click on the Revision to review, and either Accept or Reject the Revision.

If they accept, a dialog will pop up asking them to merge it into a Release.  The publisher can either merge just the changes listed there on the screen, or in certain rare situations, they may want to replace the entire Release with the Revision.

Finally, the publisher can go to the Publish tab to publish the Release.  We'll go over how to publish in the Publishing tutorial later on.

Bypassing Revisions

Although revisions are a highly effective way to manage changes, in very simple sites, where there is only one user and only a few pages of content, it may be easier to avoid revisions.  In this case, the publisher can always have a Release checked out, and make changes directly in the Release.  This will bypass the entire revision process.