SVN for webdesign
Not sure if this setup would help you, but this is how I run my version control.
First, 1 note about having the repositories hosted elsewhere… What happens if you are working without an internet connection? I’ve run into that problem a few times, and is one of the reasons I’m looking more at Git or Mercucial, with the ability to do offline commits.
That being said, I am a designer/developer who is constantly working both with binaries (flash, illustrator, psd and video files) as well as web related text files.
I orginally looked at using Adobe Version Cue, as a friend of mine is a big fan, but it was limited in the control you could have.
After setting up SVN, I have been very happy with using the following structure for almost all projects.
Each client gets a new repository, just to keep things simple, and to control access. The file structure below that level is as follows.
Project#-Project Name ../branches ../tags ../trunk ../../creative ../../../comps ../../../assets ../../dev ../../../build ../../../interactive
That’s the basic structure. I also have a folder for project management related items as well as a “legal” folder which has contract and billing related stuff.
svnX is a usable GUI, but I can’t wait till versions comes out. http://versionsapp.com. It’s been in development for a while, but really looks pretty sweet, and their other software is great.
I use dreamhost as a big backup disk, using macFusion and superDuper. I keep my dreamhost share mounted over ssh with macFusion, and superDuper backs up to it every night… I just recently had an issue where 3 of my repositories got corrupted, and being able to dl the backup from the day before was priceless.
1 benefit to hosting svn offsite is the ability to do svn checkout http://server/blah livewebsite. I get around this using dyndns.org to have a url that always tracks back to my computer, so I can do checkouts on any host that supports svn. I usually set up each site to have 2 domains, a staging and a live. Staging maps to the dev/build folder, and the live gets mapped to whatever the most recent release is. svn switch is great for flipping over to a new release on the live site.
I forgot to mention that I have the above folder structure set up in a repository, so that I can export it to a new project whenever needed. I do the same thing with my folder structure for websites as well, using a standardized setup of css and js files as well.
Source: Ben Kutil comment on 43Folders
