Version Control of FTP Directory

Question

I'm a web developer and I often have to work with designers with whom I share clients. These designers usually are using Dreamweaver or just plain FTP to work on their portion of the project. Internally I use version control (SVN) for any project that does not require collaboration with other designers/companies. I would like to get to a place where I can get their work under version control. Problem is that being designers they have no desire to use version control and most definitely wouldn't take the time to modify their workflow and learn how to do it.

So I've resorted to do it for them. I need the ability to do version control over FTP. I need to be able to commit changes made on the FTP server to a repository. I'm open to using almost any version control system. I like mercurial and bazaar, SVN is getting a bit long in the tooth.

One other note I almost never have shell access to any of the web servers mostly due to shared hosting situations.

Any ideas, I've been working on and off for months on this and cannot come up with any solutions.

Answer 1

I'd recommend using git and git-ftp, personally I used a home made script.

Answer 2

It's hard to set up anything if you don't have control over the server. You can ask the IT people in charge of the server if they can make the ftp server run "svn update" in a specific folder when specific users connect and have it run "svn commit" when those users disconnect, and, barring that, you can ask the IT people to set up a cron job that just periodically runs "svn update" and "svn commit" in a specific directory for you. If the IT people won't allow it, though, than there is not much you can do, except switch to a better IT group.