I’m a big fan of a more tightly controlled live version of a site – not having anything go live unless it’s gone through SVN and probably some time on a staging server having others in the company bang on it for a while. Of course, there will always be emergencies, or tiny little edits like adding new users to to a .htpasswd file where pushing a new revision just isn’t worth it, but the next thing I do is add it to my local development copy of the site and get it checked in.

The last year has only really been me, but now I’ve got a couple other developers helping me, having strong procedures is even more important.

I’ve got my boss quite well trained on that score now – well, at least since I was out for the day and he had a temp developer editing live on the server to add a ‘simple button’ to a globally included template. I found out about that one when I got the txt alert – ‘site is down’. Oops.

I’m planning to write up on my Livejournal how I use SVN exports and symlinks to go from one version to another – and back, if required.

OTOH, Maybe I’m just a control freak :)