Implementing Version Handling in Yet Another CMS

Just Another CMS , JACMS for short, is the evolution and current iteration of the author’s long-standing dream to create a content management system using XML technologies and tools. JACMS, a content management application built on top of eXist-db, is very much a work in progress, and whilst this paper started as a tale of the entire system, from authoring to publishing and everything between, that approach turned out to be prohibitive. As a sanity-saving measure, the author eventually decided to focus on JACMS’s version management, itself based on XML. JACMS’s version handling is based on Version Markup Language (VML), a versioning abstraction designed to identify “meaningful” versions on an arbitrary number of levels, e.g. 1.2.3.4.5, etc. The implementation, on-going at the time of this writing, is written in XQuery and XSLT, with the UIs produced by XForms, and includes not only VML instances and code to describing and managing version histories but also an extended XLink linkbase.