expanding shop and need advice from medium-sized development firms

Question

I have been a basic 5-person basic php/html/css shop for quite a while and recently we have been working on larger and more intensive projects requiring multiple coders on a single project and MUCH larger applications vs. simple "websites". So we are looking at using SVN or something to avoid the constant "he didn't donwload the main copy before updating and then uploaded over the original" issues and the "can we just go back to the site the way it was last week and start over" issues.

Can anyone comment on the following:

1. A good place to learn how to use SVN. We have limited knowledge of UNIX (enough to do basic stuff like file management and modification).

2. A good place to learn about how to organize 3 or so employees who each want to stop overlapping each other's coding efforts and maintain a centralized way of checking-in/out items and doing things.

I'm looking for "baby-step" information as everything I can find is either geared towards the "5 page basic dreamweaver editing shop" or the "multi-geek everyone is a unix expert shop"... we are the former moving towards the latter and kind of learning how to organize our company as we go.

Answer 1

SVN is a good thing to start with and you are in the right direction.

For SVN there are two steps: - First install the repository. A small tutorial can be seen here
- And than you can use tool like tortoise svn on the client side for the individual developers to work with.

Answer 2

You make some good points. You should definitly go learn to use SVN. There are loads of tutorials on the web - Google.

With regards to team work I will suggest that use a hosted solution that supports tickets to some degree so that you can coordinate the work.

An app like Beanstalk is one solution of such. With regards to managing development using SVN, I like the idea of using different branches for each stage of the development. You commit to the staging branch and your SVN setup (Beanstalk for instance) will automatically deploy to your staging server. You commit to production branch ... and so on. For more on this have a look at this question.

ps: my suggestion is that you should go and learn the SVN command line before installing a GUI.