Auditor or Content History

Hi,

Can somebody tell me when should I use Auditor and when Content History?

Are they so different? I guess Content History is only for Content and Auditor is for everything.

Thank You

Auditor is indeed for everything but it has some limitations in that you need MYSQL 5 and certain privileges with this to use it, not everyone has this, its a bit all or nothing in this respect. Also unless you install the modx-auditor-analysis tool data recovery is fairly manual, ie you need to use phpmyadmin or some such to view the history database contents, its not well integrated into MODx in this respect.

However, it is non-intrusive on the core and will catch all updates to the database, not just those from manager/web user access, i.e if you create a document say in a snippet or by some other external script (outside of MODx even) this will also be historied. It really depends on what your requirements are in this respect.

If you want a full audit trail of updates to the database allowing recovery of versions then you need Auditor. If you are primarily concerned with document content and ease of use then you need content history.

I like content history’s simplicity and interface (it is something that my clients can understand). I like that auditor is for everything (really everything, all database activity). They have much different approaches, auditor is database event triggered and ch is triggered by modx events. Actually, I think you could use both if you want since they work on different levels. I don’t think anyone could say one or the other, both are relatively new and both are great projects to have here in modxland.

Hi, sorry for reopening this old thread, but it would be nice to keep this discussion going.

I wanted to try both Content History 0.2.4.2 [1] and Auditor 1.4-ga [2] / Auditor Analysis 1.1 [3] with modx-ga-1.0.2 but ran into some problems.

Content History:

It took me a while to figure how it works and that it adds functionality to the edit-document form, which I liked a lot with nice dhtml. It seems to work with QuickManager. As far as I could see it adds one table to the database for the history and doesn’t alteranything else.

• needed a modification to install with 1.0.2 see support thread[4]
• License: Why Creative Commons? Which of the CC is it? How does it compare to GPL?
• known issues: url-manipulation possible to set oder delete any revision

Auditor

First from reading the help files I had the impression this module was a bit clearer on what it does but then sadly I failed installing and testing it. Also I didn’t quite get why it is split in 2 Auditor 1.4-ga and Auditor Analysis 1.1. the later has the following comment:

Still can’t upload this to the resources section, so :-

Get it here

http://bitez.hobby-site.com/index.php?id=63&relPath=projects/modx-auditor-analysis

Or go to the front page of my site and look in the news section

and bitez.hobby-site.com first served an empty .zip and was down later :/



1: http://modxcms.com/extras/package/77

2: http://modxcms.com/extras/package/24

3: http://modxcms.com/extras/package/285

4: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,29576.msg239486.html#msg239486

Hi eerne,

Auditor isn’t really split into two, Auditor itself is and always was a management module to set up the database triggers on the modx tables and manage the history database at the db level. Auditor Analysis is a tool to analyse the contents of the history database. I didn’t want to write this as a module, I thought it to onerous at the time, also you can use any db manipulation tool you like to mine/present the history data, its just a database at the end of the day.

Don’t know about the 0 length zip, I’ve tried this and it downloaded OK, also ’ve got lots of recorded downloads in my apache logs, so not sure what happened there. The downtime is my fault of course, this happens occasionally as this server is(still, aargh!) on wireless, not wired, just give it a few hours and try again.

What probs did you encounter installing Auditor btw?

Maybe I could provide some useful information on installing this for MODx Evo 1.0.4:

The first error I ran into was an error due to it’s inability to open one of the sql files. The module script determines the files to use from which directory by taking the MODx version and removing the last digit. This gave a path like "/assets/modules/auditor/sql/1.0", whereas the actual path was "/assets/modules/auditor/sql/1.0.0". I didn’t take any time to fix the PHP, I just renamed the directory to "1.0" from "1.0.0", this solved it.

The second error was a mysql error due to having a decimal point in the history database name. I removed it, and auditor installed.

Now, if I could only find the auditor analysis tool.....http://bitez.hobby-site.com/index.php?id=63&relPath=projects/modx-auditor-analysis seems to be down.

Yes, the down thing is my fault, the mains to my server is off at the mo, it will be back tomorrow at about 20:30 GMT and then all weekend, I know about the first error, I should really fix this, the second is new thanks for reporting it.