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The problem with no following through on synchronization is that you lose the ability to make constructive changes to the structure. If you add fields with the online tool, they don’t appear in your offline Elements. If you add fields in your offline Elements it’s difficult to add them to the online data. And remember, as you’ve discovered, make one mistake with your YAML or naming, and it can cause everything to stop working, so you never want to trying to manually synchronize the two.
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What you’re describing is a well-known and well-solved database problem. The issue with Elements is that, as you say, you in theory could have both things (app and site) open and operating at the same time, so something has to control which has the right to change the record. This is tricky because the app can’t see the real-time online record as it is changing in the current implementation. But that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way in a future edition of the app. What if, for example, the app CMS folders were real-time online as well as local? Then you could implement a record lock system while something is being updated from either end.
I don’t want to preclude Realmac from thinking about the real problem here, and even more so because other CMS solutions handle this situation, so I don’t want Realmac to have an inferior solution.
I’m not sure what you mean by “all the negotiations with Web hosts.” The Online editor is already navigating and changing the site, so why shouldn’t the app be able to do that? It’s really a matter of whether a record (file) is locked to one or the other at any given time. If the Online editor is open to that file, it locks it, the app can’t get to it. If the app is open to that file, it locks it, the online editor can’t get to it. The only real issue is messaging to the user.
Thank you Thom!
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This is garbage, huge dumps like this from LLM’s are not helpful (or accurate).
Remember, if you tell an LLM it’s doable it’ll say “oh yes, actually you’re right, blah blah blah”. Don’t blindly believe anything an LLM tells you.
Anyway, if we want to do sync between the Elements App and the online CMS, we absolutely can. However, it’s not top priority right now as we have a lot of other things on our plate, The CMS is also still relatively new so it needs more work on it (and the app) before we start adding in a sync engine.
If you’re building a site that uses the CMS I’d recommend using the online editor as the source of truth. Just put a few dummy Markdown files inside of Elements while you develop it (set them to not be published using the cloud icon in the file list).
Hope that helps clear things up.
I’d personally like to ban these large LLM dumps on the forum, they bother me…
Yes, I meant this comment to be public.
Claude went down a rabbit hole. Can a file be locked on a server? Can a file be locked on a Mac? The answer to both those questions is yes.
Sure, coordinating potential Lock Race is a programming challenge, but as I noted it’s a known problem and solved problem. Yes, it would take significant work to do, but known work.
My problem with the current situation is slightly different. I have a site with an Elements file and 10 posts. I’ve entered five new posts with the online editor, but they’re not reflected in the Elements file. If I erase all the files on the site for some reason and republish from Elements, I end up with 10 posts instead of my original 15. I really don’t want to involve a third thing (edit the site via FTP connection) to pull files out of the site backup into the site, and the more files I have, the more pain it’s going to be to figure out what’s where and what I might need to recopy. So I say, yes, we need a way to synchronize our app and our published site CMS, otherwise this problem will just slowly spiral out of control on an active site.
Moreover, many of Elements’ users are developers for other people. If they deploy with the online editor and hand the site over to the user, when the user enters 20 posts and then does something really screwy, what’s going to happen then? I’ve seen users “accidentally” delete files that shouldn’t be deleted, including the backups.
I believe the Elements app should be the golden file. If my server provider goes out of business and takes all my files with them, oopsie, I don’t have all those posts any more. Realmac wants all of us to put Elements into production uses. Well, production use means being able to survive things like this. Or at least it should.
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