Thread

Hello,

We are moving away from a central development server setup (multiple developers, designers, content editors) all working on the same (offline) development installation and doing their stuff… because of multiple reasons: people overwriting each other changes, not in the office is no development, etc

I would like us to work in a decentralised setup where we all have a local development environment on our pc’s or macs and be able to work in a structured way overcoming all problems mentioned above.

What do you think is the most ideal way to accomplish this?  Would it be worth looking at stuff like (internet hosted) subversion, do we need one database server centrally on the internet or how do we merge those multiple instances if the MySQL’s are hosted locally.  Is there a way to automate the release of the development version to a staging environment, how do make this all work for the less technical persons, etc.

A lot of questions as you see, I hope you can help!

best regards,
Tim

I’d keep your central dev server but use a subversion server for the templates/css/js/images/etc.  all you need to do is have a post-commit hook update a working copy of the site used by apache as the document root for the dev domain.

example hooks/post-commit file:

#!/bin/bash
REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"

# update the working copy in /home/sites
/usr/bin/svn update /home/sites/mysite

Thanks for your response!
What is your rational for keeping the central development server?  Isn’t that why subversion is used (apart from tracking changes) to make multiple instances can coexist and be merged afterwards?

the problem with developing EE in separate local ‘working copies’ is that it is difficult to version and merge the database structure when you add weblogs/custom fields/categories/etc.  Because the order of custom fields matters if you ever have to write a custom query and maintaining that order across more than a couple instances of EE is such a pain still it leads us to develop on a central dev server and then push the work done there to a live server when it is finished.

We use our subversion branches and tags for release points, for what it’s worth.

Thanks, this is very useful info!

Anyone else with a clear opinion about this subject?

We too develop on a centralized development server.
I have over 50 editors, and growing along with 6 developers.
As mentioned, it’s hard enough keeping 2 EE setups synced, nevermind X many.
Though many of the developers have their own sandbox setup.
All of the potentially production projects are worked out on the development server first, then migrated.  We don’t have an end all solution to migrate, yet.

This has always been a bone of contention for ee developers.

Jim