A versioning workflow for multiple similar (but not identical) deployments

Posted by rs77 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by rs77
Published on 2012-08-05T06:45:32Z Indexed on 2012/09/03 15:38 UTC
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I'm currently employed at a small non-tech organisation and have been given the role of coding the organisations' website. While I have enjoyed the task and have learnt much with web dev I've encountered a few issues that I'm hoping someone will be able to help with me or at least point me in the right direction on.

A little background:

The site I work on has subdomains that each have their own separate WordPress installation on - as this has been the easiest "backend" admin panel for the type of user who will be responsible for updating content (etc).

Within the organisation I work under the Marketing Manager (MM) and I code according to his style guide and wire frames.

While we have been working with only one subdomain since the beginning of the year the project has been relatively simple and straightforward. However, lately the workflow is becoming a little more complicated as our original subdomain has been copied over to the other subdomains. Each of the new subdomains receives minor edits to their stylesheets (eg. different pictures for background, slightly different colours here and there, etc).

The issue:

At the moment managing all the different subdomains has been "bearable", but the straw that's braking the camel's back at the moment has been the slight reversions the MM has required now that the CEO has seen the final product. The problem I'm having with reversions in stylesheets is that the CEO will one week state that he likes change "X" and then as the MM and I continue to modify the site (to now "Z"), will another week state that he wants us to change "X" to "W" but keeping most of the changes made in "Y".

What I'm looking for is something that allows for:

  • tracking file changes
  • reverting changes made (or reverting back to 'a' from 'e' but including changes 'b' & 'c')
  • easily upload necessary files to their respective WP-theme installation

Does anything out there come close to addressing these issues? If so, what?

Thanks for any help!

PS - I'm learning Git at the moment and it seems to do the "tracking file changes" quite nicely. Haven't learnt about the reverting changes bit yet, though. Maybe for my final point I'm thinking of creating a shell script to automatically upload the files to their folders. Does Git do this too though?


Addendum (alexbbrown)

I had a similar problem: I ran a custom version of mediawiki where I installed various extensions in the versioned core (with svn). Each of the extensions required an section in the confit file, but the confit file also needed local configuration for each of several deployments. I could have implemented it using includes, but they would not be versioned; and rebasing branches each time is a chore. +50 experience points for a good answer in git.

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