[Web4lib] managing files...

[Jonathan Gorman]

On Wed, 10 May 2006, Mark Gilman wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I maintain several different websites of varying size and complexity.  In
> the case of the largest one, with thousands of pages and files, I do not
> have FTP access and must rely on an intermediary.


Given your conditions it's hard to imagine anyone working efficiently.

>I have
> Frontpage and various free code editors, but not, say, Dreamweaver.

Not sure Dreamweaver would really help here.

> Lately,
> I've imported the entire site onto my local drive, so that I'm working on a
> clone, but I still worry about getting out of synch with what's online, and
> it's a bit of a pain to keep saving the source from the server to the local
> verisimilitude of the site.
>
> Anyone know of a better solution that doesn't rely upon FTP access?  The

It's not the best solution, but I'd use a combination of mirroring tools 
and a versioning system.  Personally, I'd probably use a combination of 
wget and svn or cvs.  In the case where there might be other people 
editing the files, I'd have a process running the wget mirroring tool at 
pretty regular intervals and trying to commit.  I'd have it send me a 
process when that happened so I'd know if everything merged fine or if 
there was a conflict I needed to solve.  I keep this separate from my 
current working version.

I'd then use a combination of the logging capabilities of svn and the 
ability to have "hooks".  After committing the changes to a version where 
I'd be ready to upload, I could then run some commands and find out all 
the files I've changed since I'd started revising my mirror version.

But setup in this case would require some time getting familiar with svn 
or cvs.  There might be more docs available for cvs than svn but svn is 
getting pretty old now.  If you do a lot of changes, getting familiar with 
a versioning system is worth very, very helpful.  It would also give you 
the ability to "roll" back mistakes and correct them.



Jon Gorman