For W3C internal needs, a collaborative editing solution using CVS ahs benn developped. It is part of the standard distribution, but to use it, you need to add jigedit.jar to your CLASSPATH.
Jigedit works with three spaces:
Due to some limitations in CVS, direct access to the repository is needed, CVS server or rsh/ssh-ed CVS will not work or only with severe limitations.
The classic scheme is a user who has a local editing space. The client gets
a page from his editing space (with or without automatic synchronization with
the CVS repository - latest version), edit, and sace the edits using a
PUT-aware client, like Amaya.
The document is then saved on the client editing space, and this document can
be commited automatically in the CVS repository, so that other editors can
share the latest edits.
Then, when all the documents the client edited are ready for publication, the
client goes to his PutList, and propagate the changes to the publishing space
(it can, of course, be automated, using the "auto-publish" option).
Also, direct editing on the publishing space can be done, the publishing phase is then no longer needed, and the auto-commit option should be enabled, so that users editing their own space are as much as possible synchronized with the exported version.
To be able to track who is doing what, or simply to reuse the
$Id$ tags of CVS, a per-user authorization
scheme has to be done, but it is always good to prevent everyone to edit your
website!
NOTE: To be able to change its name, cvs 1.10 has to be patched, otherwise,
the name used will always be the username who started the server.
user - PutList
|- editing space
Note the PutList, which is in charge of propagating the changes to the
publishing space.Basically, a leaf or container resource under Cvs control are usually like this
Also, you may have different setup if you don't want automatic cvs update (done by AutoLookupDirectory). You may also want to have a Cvs form to help you with cvs commands. This is a fake resource, so its type is org.w3c.tools.resources.FramedResource and the frame in charge of all the CVS commands is org.w3c.jigedit.cvs.CvsFrame
Of course you can setup some indexers to create the skeleton of user's accounts. As there is not (yet) support for automatic renaming with the indexers, some work has to be done manually after the automatic indexing, like the PutList file references and other things.
The following description has been done based on W3C's editing space, with a fixed Icons repository and also a fixed StyleSheets repository.