Creating Product Links on the Server

Managing your project sites for many projects may give slow you down on every release if you want to maintain a single point of entry for the latest version of each project and a permanent link for each versioned site. Additionally you may want to have a link to the latest snapshot version, too. Every release should also provide links back to older versions, just in case a user landed on the latest version, but want to read the documentation for the version she actually employs.



Therefore you have

  http://my-company.com/my-product-one

pointing to the latest version (release). But this is only a link to a folder deeper on this server.

  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/LATEST
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/SNAPSHOT

pointing to the latest release and snapshot release. And you have the site for each version ever released:

  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.1.0
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.1.1
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.1.2
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.1.3
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.2.0
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.2.1
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.2.2
  ...
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/1.0.0
  ...
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/2.0.0
  ...
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/4.23.42

And within each version you have links to the previous versions:

  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.1.1/../0.1.0
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.1.2/../0.1.0
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.1.2/../0.1.1
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.1.3/../0.1.0
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.1.3/../0.1.1
  http://my-company.com/category-a/my-product-one/0.1.3/../0.1.2
  ...

Creating the links manually will soon get very unproductive. So we automated this process by creating our smartics-softlink-tool. You may use it to run over your project folder once or start a demon that watches you project folder for any changes.