SVN Best practice for a "branch" of your main product ?

Question

At my job we develop websites - however now we're going to make a "whitelabelled" version of a site, which basically means it's the same site, however with a different logo and hosted on a different domain.

Also it'll have minor graphical differences, but overall the engine is the same.

My initial thought for keeping this in SVN, was to just make a branch for it - however I'm not quite certain if this could give me trouble later on.

Normally I keep my branches somewhat short lived - mainly used for developing a new feature, without disturbing trunk.

We need to be able to merge trunk changes into this "whitelabel" version, which I why I thought about branching it in the first place.

So what's the best way to archive this ?

Answer 1

When I've worked on a white-labelled website before, it's been built from the same source for every brand with a configuration parameter telling it what branding to use at runtime. However, you could also provide the common functionality and resources in a module that's imported into each of the branded version branches using svn externals, so that changes in the common code can be automatically tracked in each branding. So the branch for each brand just contains the brand-specific resources.