Publication: one project, multiple developers (part 2)

Here are remaining steps from previous post about publication:

Step 5: Everybody on Version Control System (VCS)

I do not know how many times I have drawn this diagram but it’s been a few! Here’s the best picture I got from it:

Our VCS in Subversion (SVN).

Golden Rule: No FTP access to project files (they must be in SVN to be published).

This illustrates how we work with VCS. All developers commit their code to SVN and update regularly to make sure their code is merged and still works with the latest updates.

Golden Rule: Always update your copy and test before committing your code.

Staging and live servers are a unidirectional working copy from SVN.

Golden Rule: Never commit anything from staging or the live servers

Publication: one project, multiple developers (part 1)

Publication is a fascinating area of web development. Especially for projects that involve blogs mixed with eCommerce, multi-lingual and multi-site projects.

It’s exciting to see a team of developers coding the brink of Social Media embedded in product pages of an online shop.

As projects grow the dev team grows with them. Developers hungry for coding join in and start doing their magic.

When you have more than one developer working on a project they can accidentally overwrite each other’s code by uploading files or simply by deleting required files, so the risk of publication processes increases.

To minimize the risk - and the delays they cause - software packages can be used, rules can be set and procedures followed… the goal is to achieve painless publication of a website and its updates.