[Tutorial] Using Subversion with MODx

I just posted a quick tutorial on using Subversion with MODx. It is available at http://wiki.modxscrolls.com/index.php?title=Subversion - comments and criticism are welcome.

Mike

Great tutorial! Thanks for that. I have been playing with MODx and SVN but the big question for me is the DB--what do you with the DB contents. These like much else in MODx are DB dependent from templates to snippets. Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Jay

I’m too new to all of this to have much of a clue Assuming that we’re talking about the DB items like variables and chunks, I can see dumping tables to flat files and letting subversion do the deltas. I think that would be simple for chunks since they’re just text and not really related to anything else. I don’t understand enough about the other items, like TVs, to know if it’s possible to get a consistent snapshot of them.

Mike

In my dev environment at work, it’s unusual to put database entries through the versioning control... usually the reason they’re in the database in the first place is so they can change quickly.

But I see the issue here. Wordpress has a folder where these additional plug-ins/snippets get installed, whereas MODx puts this stuff in the database.

Perhaps the easy solution here is to just upload the new versions of the snippets and name them with a version number, where the most recent one uses the "real" snippet name. E.g.

[[ My Snippet ]] would be renamed to [[ My Snippet v1 ]]
and [[ My Snippet v2 ]] could be renamed to [[ My Snippet ]]
That way every page that used the [[ My Snippet ]] code would now pull its results from the new bit of code.

This solution is a bit low-brow... I suppose ideally, you’d add a column to the database that defined the version of the snippet and you’d be able to choose which one is active.

Why couldn’t you use a simple include line in the snippet, and have your actual code in a file that is managed by svn?

@sottwell, can you point me to an example of what you are talking about? i’m not sure if this is about the cache or the content or plugin/snippets.

It’s about the actual snippets. Instead of having a lot of php code in the snippet in the Manager, just have one include ’filename’ line. Specify the path to the .php file. You can actually do this with all of the snippets, put the code in a .php file and include it in the snippet in the Manager. This way you will have a much smaller cache file, as well as the ability to work with the .php files as files.

You can even put your template HTML into a file, and in the template field in the Manager have just a snippet; the snippet code would include the file.

my goal is to learn one new thing every day - modx certainly makes that easy