Just wondering, has anyone here worked in an environment that uses svn to manage web development projects (including whole site maintence)?

I've found a fair bit of info with regards to web app development, but not much in terms of implementation for site maintaince.

I've used SVN on one of the PHP project recently. You can get a nice tool that integrate into Eclipse editor which makes check-in / check-out stuff quite easy. Not sure how you mean by "whole site maintenance" though.

I will admit that I have not played with SVN extensively i.e. haven't tried to do branch off the source etc. but from what I've heard it's quite easy to do.

we use it a lot

how do you mean you can't find info for site maintenance?

basically you just check out whichever revision you want from the trunk to the production environment using 'svn co svn://repo.server.addr/path/to/trunk .' and then keep it updated with 'svn up' when you make updates to the trunk and you're ready to deploy them to production

'svn help' will give you a pretty reasonable guide for the svn commands, and the subversion website has pretty good docs if you need more

by "whole site maintaince" i mean, routine content updates to an entire site.

from what i read, it seems to be fine if there's only one person doing maintance and is using it for revisions and stuff

because if we have 4 people actively updating the site, different parts of the trunk will differ from the each developer's branch. so each developer would be required to routinely refresh their branch. And to my understanding, you can't just check a file out and have svn automatically check out it's dependant files (images, ssi, etc., etc.)... so easiest way (or way that involves the least fiddling) would be to just check-out the entire site (which is about 5000 files at around 200MB)... correct me if i'm wrong

but in the end i was thinking, each developer would have a branch (on their local machine with a webserver) to do their work on, the commit changes to the test server (which would be the trunk). And after that some kind of cron job to move the files from the test server to the live environment if certain criteria are met (eg. publishing date within the metadata). am i going about this the correct way? or is there a better solution?

then after that, i need to find a way to make contribute play nice under svn. *ick*

You can get a nice tool that integrate into Eclipse editor which makes check-in / check-out stuff quite easy.

I've seen the plugin for eclipse, but need to find a suitable (good and cheap/free) one for dreamweaver... yeah, the team here uses dreamweaver and i'm the only one using eclipse.

yeah exactly, each developer checks out either an entire trunk or just part of it, then works on it, commits changes back to trunk after testing, then if you're happy that they're ready for production you just svn up on production server

the trunk is stored in a respository though, not a test server - your test server, production server, dev server are all just single checked out copies of that trunk

just make it a habit as a developer to regularly (couple of times a day, depending on how busy the project is) update your checked out copy by typing 'svn up' so you've got the latest changes to reduce the chance of merge conflicts

we have from 1-10 or so people working on a given project with svn, some of them very busy (particularly during development) with lots of code changes. we don't have a lot of issues with conflicts, they do occur sometimes though - but are typically easy to deal with

cool, thanks the advice Jim. I gotta try to convince the boss now :)

We use perforce ( same concept )at work with about 200 active developers, It's basically used the same way Jim described and we very rarely have issues. I think it's just a matter of getting everyone into the right mindset who uses it.

stinky, what do you mean by the 'right mindset'?

He means the users have to see the value of the extra work involved in making it work. Otherwise they won't do it properly, and when that happens it all goes to poop.

Most of my web stuff is still on CVS, but all my Java stuff at work I use SVN for. We swapped over about 2 months ago after using CVS for years.

I certainly prefer the CVS branching method to that of SVN.

Yeah we use it at work (I'm a web developer) but I have nothing useful to say about it