Collaboration

One of the goals of the template system is to foster collaboration among programmers and HTML authors. Authors need to be able to add and edit templates to a developing site without having shell access. Perhaps the biggest problem with allowing this type of access is that it complicates any effort to use version control to track changes to the site. The template system includes a file upload script that is intended to address this problem. Template authors upload files by the following mechanism:

1. For existing templates or images, they use FTP to download the files to their local computer. Otherwise they start a new file on their local computer.
2. When they are ready to upload their changes, they visit the file upload form in the site admin page at https://www.yourdomain.com/admin/template/file-upload.adp. The form asks for a local file, a remote URL, and a change description.
3. The submission script first checks the file type. If it is a text file, it strips carriage returns and writes the file to the submitted URL. If it is an image, it just copies the file to the submitted URL.
4. Once the file is in place, the script exec's cvs add on the file. If the file is already in the repository, this will do nothing.
5. Then the script exec's cvs commit on the file. This will commit the uploaded changes and rev the file.