Last week I wrote an email to a client who hasn't yet implemented source control, but who is thinking about it. It turned into rather a long email as I attempted to convey WAY too much information in one long email. After some twitter banter, I repackaged my thoughts into a whitepaper on Source Control entitled You're not using source control? Read This! (PDF, no registration needed).

The whitepaper looks at three different tools - Subversion, git and Mercurial (Hg) - and includes a "sales pitch" you can give to the people involved in your project about how it can help them. There's also a few helpful links included at the end for more information about each piece of software.

I [replied to the email] with some suggestions (and my consulting rate) attached, and we had a little email exchange about some improvements that could fit in with the existing setup, both of the hardware and of the team skills. Then I started to think ... he probably isn't the only person who is wondering if there's a better way. So here's my advice, now with pictures!

She's broken it up into a few different sections to make it a bit more easily digestible:

• A "starting point" where there's a development, staging and live environments
• Using source control to manage code
• Branching for effective coordination
• Integration of automated deployment

She also mentions other "bonus points" like making a build server, documentation generation and Javascript/CSS minification.

His articles cover:

• Things to take into consideration when creating a deployment process
• Using rsync
• Integration of source code management
• Creating PEAR packages
• Making installable packages (like yum, RPM, etc)

This last option, while a bit more difficult than some of the others, seems to becoming more and more popular as a self-contained, easy to deploy method that's very controllable.

If you ask most developers about source control, they'll agree that it's a wise thing to use. They'll insist that they think it's important. But yet, why are so many companies out there still not using source control in their projects? A good number of companies that I've worked with failed to make use of source control, resulting in issues that would have been trivial otherwise. In this article we'll explore ways to make sure that if your company isn't using source control, that you can help make a change to this policy.

He makes a few suggestions about implementing version control in your environment (it doesn't need to come from the top), how it's best put in place before a crisis and how the real person that might need the convincing could be your fellow cowrokers.

As projects start to get a little larger, it becomes crucial that you manage your code in an easy and organized manner. Using subversion is a breeze with tools like TortoiseSVN on windows and SCPlugin on the mac.

This article is an attempt at introducing the concept of SVN. There are many great tutorials out there that outline the steps for installing SVN on windows, mac and linux.

He talks about why using version control is a good thing, how it can speed up testing and even relates it back to PHPers with a sample workflow (with graphic) and some helpful hints as you introduce this very handy functionality into your development process.