Creating new versions of material

[tarmo]

With any material the user can decide to make a new version. In he material's front page is a link "create new version", which adds opens the edit form for a new material version, prefilled with current information.

Licencing terms may limit what can be edited (like authors, which you can only append to). Saving options are like in story "User translates content", #38.

[jan]

I agree with the ideas here, but would emphasize that we should divide between content and structure. In a xml-profile you would typically have the content stored within html-files and such that are referenced in the xml-file (like in LOM content packaging). But the structure of the xml-file is quite different and you should be able to modify the process which the xml-file models.

[tarmo]

Upgraded description to use current concepts.

[jukka]

I have a related worry: Lots of versions from same resource could make a quick mess off search results and other catalog-based searches. Versions that are translations of content should be found with searches, but otherwise we should devise a rule to avoid search results that are essentially the same resource times ten. If title=title, show only newest?

It could even make sense to check and remove older deprecated versions from catalog when new version is available.

[tarmo]

Well, even the title can change when a new version is created... We'll have to see how people use the system. I'd at least hope that small changes are made during the draft state and after publishing new versions are created when there is some major change to be done. But maybe I'm wrong. It's good to keep this in mind, though, but we can't just automatically keep the newest version, since the revision tree is a tree and can have several branches with very different variations.

Maybe we need some kind of help from the users, like a check box in the style of "This is a small change" as in MediaWiki, which would allow us to determine, whether a new version is a small change, and thus a replacement of the previous one, or whether it's something different.

Or we can just keep the latest version of each author as active. I think we'll need a new state, called "obsolete" or something, for when the same author makes a new version, or when a new "small change" version comes along.

[hans]

In search results we can display only the latest version in one language (if English is available, then in English, else in language of the latest version). In addition to this result we should display links to other translations and other versions:

5 translations 3 versions

[tarmo]

Concept map of different versions of a resource, and the references between them

[tarmo]

Changed title