It has just occured to me that I don’t know any single small web development suite (from UltraEdit all the way to Dreamweaver) that would have a simple version or revision control. Of course, there are SVN, CVS, Visual SourceSafe and that monstrous Team Foundation Server, but they are not the solution.
But what a small business owner to do? Or a freelancer? Or a team of less then ten-twelve people? All these creatures seem a bit… overpowered. It’s like purchasing a freight truck instead of a van. For a team of ten hardcore programmers – it’s a great tool. For web designer, couple of coders, technical writer and their project manager – it’s the common pain in their individual necks.
So what I want to see is the tool that can:
- integrate into popular HTML editors, like Dreamweaver, UltraEdit or others
- act as a standalone application
- take “snapshots” of selected folders
- produce list of new/altered/deleted files between any two snapshots or current files
- export full or partial set of files based on selected snapshot and provided criteria
- produce delta between various file revisions (at least plain text files and documents)
- produce various simple reports based on criteria selected
- work on both Windows and Mac OS X platforms
- be integrated into client-server environment
This, the way I see it, is a huge potential niche for someone who can throw such software into it. Traditionally, small businesses or freelancers relied either on multiple copies of files or backups. Another culprit is that most of version control systems designed by programmers and for programmers, so average person would have a hard time figuring things out (which is why it isn’t worth it).