Is there a way to version nodes on Drupal 7?

Question

On a website with software documentation, I need to create a new version for a node always that the information changes for a new software release.

Here is an example: For the product x version 1.0, I have a node (ID: 1000) that explains how to install the product. When this product has a new release, the instructions need to change. Currently, what I do is to create a different node (ID: 1001) for product x version 2.0, also called how to install. The issue is that, since these two nodes are totally disconnected, as my database grows, managing these versions is getting too painful.

Ideally, I wouldn't have totally disconnected nodes for the same kind of information, but version that node as the product version changes. Is there any module that allows me to do it? If not, any idea on how to solve the issue?

Thank you

Answer 1

It sounds like you want to use node revisioning https://www.drupal.org/node/320614

Answer 2

My approach would be to use a makeshift solution via entity reference and/or Rules. On a similar project, we used the Rules Link module to remove the author/ownership of the post but keep a reference for later processing by cloning the user entity in said rule to another field.
You could do the same: Automatically generate a new node with a reference to the old one and maybe copies of certain fields.

Depending on how much content you want to reuse, there's the Node Clone module and the Node clone on Save project seems like a fitting case, too (didn't test it).

Before the entity reference module got to be so mighty in Drupal 7 I often heard that sharing a common taxonomy term between 2 nodes would be another easy way to keep nodes „bundled“ – I'm not sure about the UX implications though.

Answer 3

Sorry, seeing that you're talking about documentation, another solution would be to simply activate the Books module and define a book for each product with the different versions as pages (see Drupal documentation as reference – you can easily style the structure, e.g. as tabs).

The module uses the menu system (up to Drupal 7) to keep a simple structure on top of the existing nodes. This approach has its UX limits on very large node counts.

Using the Book Made Simple module you can automatically generate a book on node creation.