I am part of a team of developers who are working on a web site. I've been trying to figure out the best way to coordinate development and assure that everyone uses the most up to date code and no one clobbers someone else's code.

I have a solution that will work, but it would be great if SiteSpinner would provide more support for this sort of activity.

I know that fundamentally SiteSpinner is a single user, standalone product and it would be extremely difficult to enable multiple users to work concurrently in the same ims; that is NOT what i am looking for.

What i would like are a couple of hooks that would make it easier to coordinate between users. Specifically, i would like:

- the ability to update the local project from the server, i.e. exactly the opposite of publish. This would get the latest .ims and all of the files associated with it off of the server and put them on the local drive in a specified location, and then open up that .ims. It should be possible for the application to get all the images, etc, and put them in the right place; the location is in the .ims.

- the ability to put a marker on the server that says that the files have been downloaded and not republished. i.e. when the user requests to get all the files from the server, a small file (think cookie) is put on the server.

- ideally this marker file would be appended each time a download or publish is done, and would include the user name of the person registered for that copy of sitespinner. then the start of a download (and, actually, a publish) could write a line to that file indicating the action and who did it.

- if the user asks to get files from the server, and the marker says that the files were already downloaded (and not republished) the application should notify the user, and ask if they want to continue. the name of the person that did the last action could be shown in the notification ("this project was downloaded by <george> and not republished. The files may be not up to date. Do you want to continue to download?")

i'm sure you can see that this doesn't prevent collisions, etc, but it would enable a process that minimizes them.

I don't know how many of your users actually operate with more than one developer working on an ims; this might be a feature that is not needed. but it would sure help us..

thanks,

doug

I can see those features would be useful, but whether they would be useful to enough people to justify the development is another matter.

Can I suggest some possible workarounds that might help for now:
1. Split the project up into separate projects, so that each developer has their own project file for their own part.

2. When someone is working on the project, use FTP to rename the project file on the sever. E.g, if George is working on the project, he renames the project file GeorgeOurProject.ims. or OurProject.George (if the server allows that).

I would also suggest that you look into using a network-ready version control system such SVN ( http://subversion.tigris.org/ ). This is the program used by many open-software project groups. There is also a GUI front-end called Tortise ( http://tortoisesvn.net/ ).

i did consider subversion, which is great for developers, but this project is mostly people with very little technical experience. interestingly, they have fewer problems with a more manual system than they do with hooking together more than one software program.

but thanks for the suggestion.

-doug

Thanks for the suggestion Doug. We will keep it mind for future versions but as you can imagine version control can get complicated quickly. (That's why there are so many version control products) Perhaps we can add some of the simpler element such as importing and exporting a project.