Utopian Setup Advice or Help Me Optimise

Hi,

I’ve been designing websites for little over 15 years, and developing them more the past 10. Over the years I have been trying to refine my way of doing things, using good old FTP for years, but now I use Git and have been for around 5 years. However, I feel like I can do better with my workflow. So I’m asking for some sound advice on how I can utilise the tools I use to improve my workflow.

Ok.

I develop using Coda, which I know isn’t the most popular tool (ST2 being that), but I like it. I also use CodeKit because I write with Sass and I love the way I can easily create templates and includes using the ‘kit’ format. I have used Grunt before, but if I much prefer GUI’s, hence CodeKit.

I use Git Tower to do all my commits and stuff, and I also use Beanstalk to deploy.

Now I know there are probably other ways of doing things and I totally appreciate that people will want to advise me to use other tools, but these are the tools I prefer to use and have done for a while, so really just looking for some advice on how to optimise my workflow.

By the way I am talking about developing websites with ExpressionEngine.

Now I think I would like to have 3 environments to run my sites with.

1. Development (local)
2. Staging
3. Live or Production (never really see the difference)

Now because I use Sass and CodeKit, I would like to be able to create ExpressionEngine code within CodeKit. Now I don’t even know if this is going to be possible, it probably isn’t but I’m just checking. It may be worth me just writing EE templates and includes in CodeKit, because let’s face it all I really want to use CK for is for compiling my Sass, and perhaps even CoffeeScript.

CodeKit has a nice option to include an External Server like MAMP, which is what I would use if I was to develop locally anyway. So I would just use CK for compiling Sass/Coffee files.

Then in Tower I would want to have an gitignore setup, although I’m not 100% certain on which files I can ignore if any, I was thinking about the base sass files, but then I’m going to want to track them should I need to roll back a revision or checkout a new branch to write some hotfixes or features etc…

I know I can set my CK to compile files into a directory, so I was thinking about having a ‘dev’ folder in my EE folder, and have it compile to my main assets folder. But how about when I do commit into Beanstalk, I’m not going to want to deploy the Sass files, so perhaps I can exclude certain files from being deployed to my various environments remotely.

Now the only thing I am slightly mixed up about is my Database. I use Sequel Pro because it’s pretty awesome, so how would I set that up within my workflow, I’m going to need 3 databases at least.

Right, I know this may seem like there isn’t a question here, and to be honest it’s just been me emptying my mind and seeing if this is a good way to do things, it kind of makes sense to me, but open to any advice, and warnings about various pitfalls I may fall into. Plus I think it’s good to talk about workflow stuff.

Any thoughts? Or have I gone a little bit Salvador Dali here?