This is a quick idea i'd like to send into the ethosphere for the 
developers on this list. I have, on occasion, ideas to make the 
ZMI/Plone a nicer place, and on many of them i am working privately 
(for now) at a solution. This is one i want to share! If you think it 
would be useful, maybe say so...

So, many times in development a problem will crop up where *something* 
has changed causing problems that are hard to diagnose. That is, we see 
the problem, but it's not always clear just what changed to cause it. 
Troubleshooting procedure then requires a full human audit of the site 
to track it down, which is a brute force solution.

The idea that occurred is that the undo screen naturally presents a 
history of changes (of course) but in the presentation given by plone 
or the ZMI does not satisfy a developers needs. If i want to undo - 
fine - i can find a (semi) recent change and roll it back, but what if 
(given that the undos haven't been cleaned up) i just want to find out 
- say - the last time the workflow state changed for an object - even 
it was two weeks ago. Now, that information is in the undo - but it 
also might be 15 pages back in the undo screen. The Undo screen just 
doesn't support auditing.

Here is the (hopefully really simple) idea: Make a ZPT to find, search, 
and audit the undo lists for arbitrary parts of the site. Cool queries 
like:

	- When was the last time (userX) changed a document
	- When was the last time (userX) modified propertyX on Folder Y?
	- When was the last time a manger edited the workflow? How about all 
the workflow changes for the past week?

And so on. I imagine it's just two parts - writing a python function to 
scan undos for areas x,y,z and wrting a ZPT to interface with it to 
restrict those results to given events.

It could be a GlobalHistory tab, i dunno

Step 2) ???
Step 3) Profit!

uh.. hey - I hope this was both informative and concise enough that 
your with me and the idea is intact. Thanks for listening!

.James.

> - When was the last time (userX) changed a document[...]

There were many times this month where I wanted those features. I agree.
[...]

James,

Sounds like great features. I am curious if you have looked at CMFEditions?

CMF Editions: http://plone.org/products/cmfeditions


 If not, might be worth a look - sounds like you want to add a search interface
into this?

Bon chance!

 Robert

Have you looked at the new versioning info in Plone 2.1?

On Monday, August 15, 2005, at 03:36PM, jamesr <circlecycle(at)gmail.com>
wrote:
[...]

Thanks for the pointer to CMF editions. I hadn't seen it, and i'm 
running 2.05 on the production side right now, but i'll be sure to go 
take a look! Still, versioning is supposed to be granular for "the 
life-cycle of a document" and i'm looking for something for developers 
troubleshooting (even if this means just a different set of search 
terms and features - could be).

In my current situation, a bunch of local roles stopped working 
correctly, and i had suspects ranging from the acl_users folder to the 
workflow to the validity of the both the group names and local role 
assignments. If i had some sort of search on specific actions, i may 
have seen that certain folders had their permissions changed manually 
in the ZMI after the state was set through plone.  Resetting the state 
on the objects finally solved the problem. That sort of condition could 
be highlighted in Really Bright Red in the permissions view in the tool 
(*grin*)

I hope i can make something like this at some point.

.j.


On Aug 15, 2005, at 6:19 PM, Robert Merrill wrote:
[...]

jamesr said:
[...]

James --

The undo information can't show you exactly what was changed; the ZODB
doesn't keep application-level information about changes (ie, it just
knows that you started and closed a transaction, and what overall objects
changed, but not what in them changed). Applications that sit on top of
the ZODB (like Zope and Plone) can add a transaction note, to note what
was done, but these notes are simple things like "Edited document" or
such, and don't contain nearly enough info for you to do any significant
filtering on them. Essentially: what you see in the undo screen is pretty
much what's available, information-wise, about an undo.

If you're having problems keeping track of dev work changes, much better
would be spend your time moving from making application development
changes in the ZMI to doing on-disk development with setup scripts, etc.,
so that you can review exactly what was done to scaffold/setup/migrate
your application.

Best,

- j.

Joel, if and when you get around to it, I know i'd profit from an  
explanation of how to do FS based management effectively, I'm tied to  
the ZMI and i get getting hints of something better, but explanation an  
of how to dump some representation of the ZODB out of zope - and then  
back into it - effectively i haven't run across. I see FSDump, but  
isn't that one way? Am i making a big mistake there? How do you  fully  
edit a zope site from the command line? Any 'lil tidbit would dew!

'bout the undo, although the trans_notes are bland, i think that data  
might actually be vauable if we could just filter by keyword/user/time  
(in the case of multiple admins, what did the other person do somewhere  
last night when a bug was noted, perhaps). That might be what I do.  
Thanks!

.j.


On Aug 16, 2005, at 12:35 AM, Joel Burton wrote:
[...][...][...]

I'll throw my two cents in here (ok $2 - I am a consultant); this is where
you really need to do FS-based development with a version control system.
The version control system (good OSS ones are CVS and Subversion) will
provide these details to you.  

If you are interested in changes to content (which of course can include
scripts and such), you can use the workflow history machinery.  We use that
extensively to record date-time of a change, the transition taken, the
resulting end state, who did it, comments, and even allow attaching a file
to that transition.  This is a different class of problem to solve though.

Configuration information, such as changing permissions on roles, should
only be done by trusted individuals.  Not to say they can't make an honest
mistake and break your system, but you should not rely on the system to tell
you these details.  Better to do this in a collaborative environment with
everyone discussing the changes to be made beforehand.

Finally, if you are interested in capturing information on content access
(i.e. who is traversing and reading your site, what stuff are they reading
and for how long, etc.), I would recommend putting in a clickstream capture
solution.

Paul


-----Original Message-----
From: zpugdc-owner(at)lists.zpugdc.org
[mailto:zpugdc-owner(at)lists.zpugdc.org]On Behalf Of jamesr
Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2005 12:52 AM
To: zpugdc(at)lists.zpugdc.org
Subject: Re: [ZPUGDC] Keeping sanity for Plone Admins, and idea


Joel, if and when you get around to it, I know i'd profit from an  
explanation of how to do FS based management effectively, I'm tied to  
the ZMI and i get getting hints of something better, but explanation an  
of how to dump some representation of the ZODB out of zope - and then  
back into it - effectively i haven't run across. I see FSDump, but  
isn't that one way? Am i making a big mistake there? How do you  fully  
edit a zope site from the command line? Any 'lil tidbit would dew!

'bout the undo, although the trans_notes are bland, i think that data  
might actually be vauable if we could just filter by keyword/user/time  
(in the case of multiple admins, what did the other person do somewhere  
last night when a bug was noted, perhaps). That might be what I do.  
Thanks!

.j.


On Aug 16, 2005, at 12:35 AM, Joel Burton wrote:
[...][...][...]
[...]