Sharing a site with your team

For developers and designers, one of Blueprint's core strengths is sharing. It's fantastically easy for many people to work on a single site at the same time without treading on each other's toes, whether they're in the same room or on opposite sides of the globe.

At the heart of it all is built-in version control using Subversion (it's worth reading a bit about this if you haven't already): all your site code, assets and data live on a server in your Sites repository, from which you grab each other's changes and to which you send your own.

(diagram)

When you first create a site, you need to get it into your Sites Repository before it can be shared. You do this using the site:specify rake task, which allows you to set the Sites Repository URL for your new site. Once it's in there, your team members can use site:retrieve, in combination with the repository URL, to grab the current version of the site.

Data and templates

It's important to note the distinction between data and templates in Blueprint. Templates are the preserve of designers and developers - they're the bits that make your site look and behave in a certain way. Data is usually the responsibility of your client, and is almost exclusively added to, edited and deleted via the site's admin interface.

Because of the high likelihood that you'll be working with dummy content or incomplete data at some point during the site development, data and templates are treated separately in Blueprint. It's important to note, too, that data can't be split off - it's not possible to merge data created for a site on one computer with data created for that same site on another.