Version Control in DITA topics

[catherine]

Hi, I have a stupid question.
How do you control different version of your documents in Oxygen XML Editor?
As for the Oxygen guides, you have version 20, version 19, and version 18.
I just want to know, how to manage and maintain different versions of documents.

What I can image is add conditional tags "rev" for the contents.
Any good idea?
Would appreciate for your any help, Thanks!

[Radu]

Hi Catherine,

You cannot hold different versions in the same DITA content. You need to use a version control system which has the support to create branches for each released version.
As an example for our user's manual we use GitHub as a version control and collaboration system, if you look here:

https://github.com/oxygenxml/userguide

there is a "Branch" combo box allowing you to create new branches for your content or to switch to a previous created branch.
On our local machines we work with Git client tools like SourceTree. For example if our technical writer needs to make a fix in the Oxygen 18.1 user's manual, they clone the user's guide GitHub project locally, switch the local repository to the "hotfixes/18.1" branch, make changes and then push them to the equivalent branch on the GitHub server. Then they generate the HTML content from that local "hotfixes/18.1" branch and upload it on our web server. On our web server, for each version there is a separate folder keeping the generated HTML content like for example:

https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/20.0/ug-editor/

Regards,
Radu

[catherine]

Thanks, Radu.
You helped me a lot and saved my day!