CMFSetup for CPS

I've started playing with CMFSetup to improve importing and exporting the configuration of a CPS site.

CMFSetup is a framework that describes the series of steps needed to setup a CMF site, for instance "setup the actions tool", "setup the workflows", etc. Each step is implemented by code that looks up the details of the configuration in XML files. The CMF Setup Tool itself allows you to execute steps individually (either in import or export mode), to make snapshots of the existing state of a site, to compare them, to revert to any of them, and of course to save the complete configuration to a file.

Yesterday I wrote some code to do the import/export for the directories configuration. I'll do the same soon for schemas and layouts, and then for the rest of the CPS tools. The goal is to be able to instanciate a CPS site entirely through this mechanism, which means that all the configuration would be in XML files.

Amon the remaining questions is, what to do about content, and what to do about things that could be considered configuration but could also be considered content. Instances of the latter are the content of directories (ZODB directories for instance). For pure content stuff, I think a global XML import/export (maybe optionaly retaining only the folder structure but not the documents) can be done.

The advantage of using CMFSetup over CPSIO is that CMFSetup brings a very rich framework for comparison and snapshots. One disadvantage of CMFSetup is that parsing the XML files on import is largely ad-hoc, and painful to code. Using a library like elementtree (like CPSIO does) would improve the process a lot, so I'll play with that.

One nice thing in coding CMFSetup import/export handlers for CPS is that CPSIO has already done this once, so all the code to introspect or recreate objects can be reused, or at least used as an inspiration. Nevertheless it's a lot of work that will have to be done piecewise.