How do I sync my development with the users?

Question

I create websites for people. I have given them the ability to edit certain areas of their published pages using CushyCMS. That works fine, and everyone is happy with it.

When I go to publish some of my more extensive changes, I first need to pull down the latest version that they have produced. Then I make my changes, and upload everything to production.

I would like to use some sort of version control in this process. This should be a classic update-edit-commit-publish workflow, but I'm not sure how to go about this. Basically I want to avoid pulling down everything locally and doing the commits. I only want to pull down what has changed.

I use filezilla, and it doesn't do a good job of identifying changed files. I can't rely on the filesize, because sometimes it stays the same. I can't rely on timestamps because the server time is different than my machine, and it never seems to work correctly.

How can I get around my problem? I use Notepad++, Subversion and FileZilla, but I'm willing to try other tools if they would make this process easier.

Answer 1

It comes down to CushyCMS's decision to edit files directly and not put the user-provided content in a database like WordPress, DotNetDuke, Drupal, etc. So the real answer is you can't get there from here and should look into migrating to a database backed CMS. Thats not what you want to hear though.

Version control will get you part of the way to concurrency but there is always the possibility of a user updating a page between your pull down and publishing the revised copy since your users wouldn't be checking into the version control system directly. That would require them to learn the version control system and negate the ease that CushyCMS (or any CMS really) provides. You'll want to try and find a system that allows your live site to be the Master to which you compare and check-out files from. I do not know of any mainstream systems that currently work that way.

Answer 2

I found that it was easiest to use a tool like Beyond Compare to handle the synchronization.