Separating CSS deployment from rest of site

Question

Where I work, the design and development departments are totally separated, however we (the design department) are responsible for managing the CSS for our sites. Typically, new CSS needs to be released to the production server far more often than new website code. Because of this, we are deploying the CSS separately, and it lives outside source control.

However, lately, we've run into a few problems with new CSS not being synched for up site releases, and in general the process is a huge headache. I've been pushing to get the CSS under some kind of source control, but having trouble finding a good deployment method that makes everyone happy. Our biggest problem is managing changes that affect current portions of the site, where the CSS changes need to go live before the site changes, but not break anything on the exisiting site.

I won't go into the finer details of the weird culture between designers and devs here, but I was wondering what experience others have had in managing large amounts of CSS (50+ files, thousands and thousands of lines) that needs to be constantly updated and released independent of site releases.

Answer 1

I'll advocate the use of source control here. Especially if the development team uses branching to deal with structured releases. That way, whatever CSS is checked into the production branch is what should be deployed ... and if it is updated mid-stream, it's the responsibility of the person (designer?) that updates it to promote that code using whatever system your company uses to promote changes to production.

Answer 2

The fancy name is "Content Delivery Network" (Wikipedia).

We store our CSS files in a database, and then have a separate website that does nothing but serve CSS resources. We implemented this in May 2007 for 1000+ websites in 30+ countries. It has worked flawlessly for the last 15 months.

Static images and even JavaScript files are handled the same way.