Freeway stores the entire site in a binary file, so any change –
nudge something 1 px in any direction – would change the signature
of that file from CVS or git or svn’s perspective and trigger a replace.
There’s no way to get inside of a binary file and track individual
changes the way you can on a big directory full of text files (like
you could with a normal site).
Freeway’s work product is a normal site which CAN be tracked this
way, but Freeway treats this work product as a throw-away – the
stream of bits sent to the printer over the network, to make a
parallel from the desktop-publishing world.
In addition, Freeway notes the modification time of all the files
that it “owns” (the files it created in the Site folder) and if there
is ever a difference between what it finds there and what it
remembers from its last publish, it will consider those files to be
damaged, and replace them. So if there are two identical Freeway
documents in the world, and one of them is modified and publishes a
set of changes, then the next one does the same, the second one will
overwrite all changes from the first document, replacing them with
only the changes that were made starting from the original point
where the two documents were duplicated from the same original. And
if you next publish (without any additional changes) from the first
document, you will revert back to the original set of changes, and
all of the second set of changes will be gone.
So here’s your options, as I see them:
-
Split the site. Carve out areas of responsibility for you and your
partner(s), and make individual Freeway documents for them. Set all
of these documents to publish and upload into the same folder on your
server, but don’t give any of them responsibility for content used in
any of the other parts of the site. Advantage: nobody can step on
anybody else’s work. Disadvantage: you and your partner(s) will
effectively be working on different sites. Each of you will maintain
a separate document, and you won’t be able to fix things in another’s
area of influence. There are a number of articles and tutorials about
splitting a site on the archives of this list and on the Softpress
KnowledgeBase.
-
Share a single binary file and site publish directory. Use a
system like iDisk or Bingo or another shared drive service to keep
your one true Freeway document safe. Make a workflow system like
sending an e-mail “I’m working on the site right now…” or renaming
a file in the shared folder “Bob has the site open” or some other
semaphore. Since the site doesn’t move, from anyone’s perspective,
you shouldn’t see any problems like over-publishing every page. The
Freeway document would stay on the network drive, be opened from
there and saved to there. Advantage: absolute coherence. No chance of
messing up the site. Disadvantage: network speed bound. If you have a
slow connection to the net, this will be painful. Needs a good system
of communication to avoid a race condition.
-
(Really sort of 2a) Put the entire Freeway document and Site
folder on a disk image. Make a new disk image using Disk Utility.
Move the document and all associated folders onto that image. An
image can be any size, and it never takes up more space on disk than
its contents + a little overhead. Store this image on your shared
drive as above, and when you need to work on the site, “check it out”
by downloading the disk image somefile.dmg to your desktop, double-
click that image to mount it as a local disk, make any updates or
changes as needed, publish the site, unmount the disk image, and then
copy the now-modified disk image back to the shared server,
overwriting (or versioning) the original that you started with.
Advantage: local publishing will be much faster, since you will be
working at local-disk speeds. Disadvantage: same as above, only one
person at a time can work on the entire site. Needs good communication.
Other ideas may be out there, but that’s about all I can think of
from here.
Certainly, if you’re open to a completely orthogonal approach, you
could use a CMS to modify the content of your pages, and just use
Freeway to generate the template. This works really well for many
types of sites. If you have a highly-designed site with not much
repetition of style between pages, then it’s pretty much a pain, though.
Walter
On Nov 19, 2008, at 8:38 AM, ferg wrote:
Hi all,
I share updating a website with a colleague. Normally whenever I
make edits, I upload the Freeway file into a CVS repository. Then
he grabs it, and uploads all changes. Unfortunately Freeway
generally decides the entire website has changed, and uploads the
entire lot. Making even trivial changes tiresome. Is there a way
around this, or how do other people have multiple users of the same
file? We are geographically quite separate, and so a shared
network drive would not work.
Thanks
Ferg
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