Setting up SVN for teamwork on WordPress custom theme development

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Amongst technical devs, it’s pretty straightforward to get everyone running their own local dev server, get TortoiseSVN running, and then commit changes periodically to the repository. We can then update the version of the test site on the shared server from this repo and everyone is happy.

Except the designers who are just scratching their heads.

Since the designers do not have their own local development server, in order for them to preview their HTML, PHP and CSS changes to the theme, they have to upload those changes to the in-house development server, which they all share access to. Adobe’s DreamWeaver provides simple file lock protection to avoid edit collisions, but that’s where it ends.

I would love a solution that allows them to use TortoiseSVN or DreamWeaver 6 (CS4)’s built in Subversion support. But I can’t see how this would work. They would basically have to “commit” every single minute edit in order to preview it on the dev server, and this of course defeats the purpose of version control.

Has anyone found a workaround for this? Is the only solution to set them all up with local webservers?

2 Answers
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If you don’t want the designers to setup a revision control on each computer (this is the normal route), set up the designers on one cloud/remote server with SVN ( or even better a DVCS) that the dev teams can pull/push to. This technique can be combined for further control, this is done so team leads or senoir dev/designers actually control what is committed or not. 

                                            Live
Designer ---\                                |                                /--- Dev         
Designer --- -- Designer Staging <-> Master Staging <-> Developer Staging --- --Dev 
Designer ---/                                                                 \--- Dev

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