Building a website with Multiple People

A question for folks. I'm a sole proprietor creating a website for a business I've been running. The site is built but we are constantly making changes to it. Here is the thing. I have two engineering contractors who are actively working on it. Sporadically, I have a graphics designer update the graphics or make visual changes (the engineers make front-end changes as well). So there are four of us who could be making changes at any one time. The problem is that we may be editing the same file at the same time.

Some things:

• We don't want to use a tool like GIT or Subversion. We've looked at them; they are too complex for what we are doing. 2 of us are non-technical and there is too much overhead.
• The site is DB-based and so don't want to use something like Wordpress. The problem isn't too many pages; we have only a few main page-types and make changes to those templates much of the time.

Given the fact that the engineers and designer work maybe 5 hours a week; we don't have that much overlap that we need to merge changes. We just want a simple solution where the person working on it can lock it for an hour or two, make changes. The contractors can work whenever they want; and waiting for it to be released is fine with their schedule. Also, do you have some collaboration software where you can keep the whole team informed about when updates were made, what the changes were.

What do you use? And how do you manage a situation where multiple people are editing the site?

 

A better solution in your case is to co-ordinate and plan between each other.

 

Set up a #slack-group or something like that, and make sure to check it before doing anything (goes for both those about to do stuff, and those doing stuff / finished doing stuff).
As you say you have non-tech people involved (seriously, GitHub is about as low-tech as you can possible get it) - slack will probably be easy enough (it's basically a collaboration environment where you can chat, set up todo-lists, set up goals etc., and assign people to tasks).

 

Can I ask - are you an engineer? Or a developer of some kind? I'm just asking because I'm looking at the basic of GitHub and it is using almost all technical language. I'm not saying it's impossible for me to come up to speed with it; but I'm interested in a dead simple solution with a simple mechanism to lock files (and maybe comment on them). Slack's interesting for chat collaboration; but I don't like that it doesn't have great persistence and organized communication. That's interesting about to-do lists and stuff on slack; i don't think i've seen those features before; or were you talking about Github?

Yes, this would be ideal. It's just that these contractors work on their own time-frame; their schedule is always shifting based on their other deliverables. So I don't want to designate fixed times; it's too much work to constantly schedule times; and then some people run over. A basic file locking mechanism would solve this; i'm a little surprised there's nothing like that. There's MS Sharepoint but that's way too much for a small project like this.

 

Git is probably as simple as it gets unless you go back to some really old versioning systems like CVS (If I remember the the abbreviation). Remember, you don't need to learn it all; just the features you need and actually use. See https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 for a tutorial.

Too, if you're using a modern, powerful text editor like Emacs, it knows several versioning systems and automagically does the next logical step for you unless you choose to do something else.

If you have multiple coders/authors, you need to have a concurrent versioning system or you need a release schedule and a project manager to make sure there are no collisions.

cheers,

gary

 

I'm a developer, yes. GitHub does not really use technical language - at least nothing overly complicated. Problem, as I see it, is that you (or your collaborators) are either not willing to learn, or lack understanding of basic concepts. I was talking about Slack, but I realise I was remembering a little bit wrong - what I was actually thinking of when it came to those things were Trello, and a completely different mash-up of the two (using custom coding and APIs allowing it to interact) - sorry about that.

There is no way of locking files across multiple users - I assume they're not actually doing the work directly on the webhost, but on local copies of the files? If not, you REALLY need to rethink your development process.

 

OK- I was asking because I readily get GIT recommendations from engineers. I have simple needs; and yes, since contractors change, especially design contractors- and many of them don't use GIT, having them each come up to speed on it as I need them doesn't make sense with my project.

I'm surprised there's not file locking tool. It's a basic thing. If it's not there, I may just put one together.

 

Thanks. I think I may just work with an engineer and build the tool I'm looking for- a simple way to use a release schedule as you mentioned, but with file locking.

 

But again - to have a proper file-locking in place, everyone has to work from the same set of files - which, unless you're all in the same office, is gonna get complicated very quickly. Unless you're working directly on the server, which is gonna blow up in your face sooner rather than later.

But, if you do make a tool as you want it, please share it with the world - I'm sure it can be useful in quite a few environments.

 

Yep. Here's what I have in mind. A cloud-based tool that makes a copy of your server files. You can download local copies of those and lock them. Edit them. Re-upload them and release them. Then, when everyone agrees, it can be published from that staging server/site to "production" (your real server). Tool is really only for small teams like the one I described.

Will definitely share it. I am motivated to have a basic tool that works for my team; but I'd also like to make it available to others, and get feedback. If enough people like it, I may make it into a product.

 

What you've described is basically exactly what GitHub does But yeah, I guess that would perhaps be a bit simpler, since you're only talking about having a file-folder somewhere, more or less.

 

I know what you're talking about, but as an example, here is one of the earliest steps in GitHub:


http://postimg.org/image/sxgeo2e8r/

This is utterly incomprehensible to most people. My interest is in a simple, intuitive interface that anyone can use right away without any time invested in studying the manual.

 

Yes, but for most people running Windows or Mac, that is clicking the button up top saying "set up in Desktop" and having the github-program on your computer. ANYBODY can do that. Getting to grips with using Github Desktop should take about an hour. Yes, sometimes you might happen upon problems, which need a bit more to work properly, and usually involves using the command line, but 90% or more of the time you click a few buttons, write a few lines of commit messages, and presto.

Granted, I would have no respect for people not understanding or being able to follow simple instructions like that, but I do set up webservers via CLI - maybe I'm weird.

 

Yep you're definitely an engineer It takes a little perspective to recognize that most people don't think in terms of repositories, deployments, and merges. It's pretty clear GITHub was cobbled together by engineers; seemingly without product managers since it is full of jargon and doesn't seem to consider the user's perspective (unless you're an engineer). The opening screen was just an example of how klugey it is. Unsurprising an engineer thinks an engineering tool is intuitive. But I do deserve that. If you ask a carpenter to solve a problem, he's going to give you something made of wood.

 

Did find a potential soultion: ftopia.com . A few disadvantages- no history of what was changed; and most importantly, no connection to server for review and publish.

 

Um, is there another way to do it? Well, that and Emacs.

g

 

Oh, there are plenty of ways to set up webservers without using the CLI - mostly via configuration tools available via control panels, one-click installs and so on

 

Not sure I'd use the word 'cobbled', as it was written by Linus Torvalds. As I recall, the the first two chapters of the tute I linked should get you going.

g

 

I was being facetious, though I do find GUIs and control panels to be fine when you want to do what they (the designers) think you should be doing; otherwise, not so much. One click installs? I use Debian Gnu/Linux, the ultimate one click install. At least you don't have to reboot to upgrade existing installs or make a new install.

g

 

split project in two multiple parts and share work in tree structure.