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So I've been a developer on a one man team for a few years now. I came to recognize the benefit of separating all of the design, html, and css work into the hands of the more gifted individuals, so I started a business, made up of other long-time 1 man teams who were limited to static websites (that looked gorgeous). You can imagine what comes next.

We've been using Zend Framework (PHP applications for most applications, which separates most of the view code from business and data layers, but occasionally one of the designers or front-end guys has to tinker with a model or view script, and I'm starting to have coordination nightmares for who is updating what files and when so we don't overwrite anyone's important changes in the dev environment. (obviously waiting for stability before production deployment)

I work with NetBeans on my local, while the others use dreamweaver. What I'm looking for is a tool that can manage file versions on the dev server, allowing check in/check out, so nobody is working on the same file at the same time. (or better yet, merges changes)

Any suggestions on a good tool for this? Would a CI tool be better or a VCS tool? The only other option I can think of is to work directly on a development server, deploy to a simprod environment, than after testing, move to prod, but I like being able to develop behind a firewall before putting something on the internet. Any recommendations would be helpful.

Thank you.

Brian Vanderbusch
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You are looking for git. Perfect for managing versions and branches, deploying to the dev or prod servers, pretty much anything you can throw at it.

nathancahill
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  • git is great however Zend recommends using phpcloud.com. There's individual source control instances teams can connect to. – dcd0181 Jun 21 '12 at 23:49
  • phpcloud doesn't suit my needs. I don't use Zend Server (Zend charges a million bucks for every service they have), and I want to develop on a local webserver behind a firewall. I'll def be researching git however. So with git, each developer downloads and configures on their own machine correct? – Brian Vanderbusch Jun 22 '12 at 00:07
  • Right. Everyone pulls from a central repository to their local machine. All editing is done locally, then changes are committed and pushed to the repository. This is an oversimplified explanation of a very powerful tool, but you get the idea. – nathancahill Jun 22 '12 at 00:13
  • Here's a great intro article: [http://www.mutuallyhuman.com/blog/2012/06/22/a-git-walkthrough/](http://www.mutuallyhuman.com/blog/2012/06/22/a-git-walkthrough/) – nathancahill Jun 22 '12 at 20:12
  • No one for Mercurial here? – Milind R Oct 19 '13 at 13:15