Building a website with Multiple People

[stevy]

A question for folks. I'm a sole proprietor creating a website for a business I've been running. The site is built but we are constantly making changes to it. Here is the thing. I have two engineering contractors who are actively working on it. Sporadically, I have a graphics designer update the graphics or make visual changes (the engineers make front-end changes as well). So there are four of us who could be making changes at any one time. The problem is that we may be editing the same file at the same time.

Some things:
We don't want to use a tool like GIT or Subversion. We've looked at them; they are too complex for what we are doing. 2 of us are non-technical and there is too much overhead.
The site is DB-based and so don't want to use something like Wordpress. The problem isn't too many pages; we have only a few main page-types and make changes to those templates much of the time.
Given the fact that the engineers and designer work maybe 5 hours a week; we don't have that much overlap that we need to merge changes. We just want a simple solution where the person working on it can lock it for an hour or two, make changes. The contractors can work whenever they want; and waiting for it to be released is fine with their schedule. Also, do you have some collaboration software where you can keep the whole team informed about when updates were made, what the changes were.

What do you use? And how do you manage a situation where multiple people are editing the site?

 

[Volcrado.com]

Source code management platforms like GIT and Subversion are certainly the best way to manage it, but as you mentioned that you aren't a technical guy to handle it.

I would suggest you to create a Skype group, and then message the whole group that you're editing a particular file. I had a similar case when I and my friend were working on a project, we used to ask each other not to touch the particular file, and always edit the code real-time without overriding each others' files. However, we sometimes did override each others' work, and we had to rework on the files, lol.

To the main point, locking files? I stay unsure about it, perhaps you should use different OS accounts (in Linux and Windows), and change the file permissions and ownerships for a temporary period.