The Holy Grail of Plone workflow

Question

We are in the process of implementing a Plone CMS as a repository for ISO9001-documents.

ISO demands a certain amount of logging, as anyone familiar with the standard probably knows :-)

For the sake of flexibility we would like to incorporate, in no specific order:

• New contenttypes : necessary to incorporate the different documents that can arise in an enterprise
• Versioning: to show that our documents are always up to date, and to show which changes were made vs a previous version of the same document
• Working copy support: so that a "published" document stays online while it is being edited
• More complex workflow: to account for the review processes which are obligated by ISO
• Different workflow for different documents: as workflow are dependent on the type of the document.

Therefore, the holy grail of workflow optimisation should be (and please correct me if I'm wrong):

• Dexterity for the content types
• CMFEdition (embedded in Plone) for versioning
• Iterate for working copy support
• plone.app.workflowmanager for the new workflows
• Products.CMFPlacefulWorkflow for the different workflows according to different documents

The problem is the integration of the different products:

• How do you get versioning to work with Dexterity?
• How do you add working copies on top of that (keeping the necessary versioning)?
• And how do you get your shiny new workflow (great UI btw for workflowmanager) to play nice with both versioning AND working copies.

I scoured the google-realm and already found these links:

• Working copies and workflows : http://plone.org/products/iterate/documentation/how-to/working-copy-workflow-customization
• Dexterity and Versioning: http://plone.org/products/dexterity/documentation/how-to/adding-versioning-to-dexterity-content-types

We also checked out:

• Archetypes contenttypes versioning: http://plone.org/documentation/manual/developer-manual/archetypes/appendix-practicals/enabling-versioning-on-your-custom-content-types

which are all installed and configured...

However, my new content type does not allow for checkout/checkin (Iterate product), and neither are versions/changes tracked in the history-view for this same contenttype.

Is their a magical sequence to follow or am I missing something (or alot -which is more likely)? Because if all these products were to work "out of the box" in my opinion this is a catchall solution to all things workflow...

addition 2012/04/17: As remarked by thet, the stack is completed with both

• versioningbehavior for Dexterity: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plone.app.versioningbehavior
• stagingbehavior fro Dexterity: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plone.app.stagingbehavior

Answer 1

You need to use plone.app.stagingbehavior (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plone.app.stagingbehavior), which links Iterate/CMFEditions to Dexterity types. Not sure about your versioning issues.

Answer 2

You can also plug in the versioningbehavior

And stagingbehavior.