My wife is a graphic designer who is starting her own business in the field of designing templates for wordpress other php based systems. I'm going to setup the servers (VMware with CentOS) so she has a good spot for development and showing the customers the progress.
At large companies you would set up a DTAP (Develop, Test, Acceptance, Production) environment with automated builds, testing, deployment, etc. I'm aiming much lower than that but I still want to have some of the benefits of a DTAP setup.
What I have in mind is a Develop (her editing corner), Acceptance (publicly available behind password for customers) and Production (simply export to ZIP file or upload to external production site). I want version control (SVN/GIT/HG) and preferably automated deployment of a specific tag she creates to the acceptance environment so the customer can see the progress.
I'm lazy so I'm looking for a ready-to-run tool or toolchain that I can download from somewhere that does (most of) this at a minimal effort from me? Or is this something that no one has created before and I have to code this from scratch using existing tools?
Any suggestions are welcome.
It really shouldnt be that hard to build a script that works for you with ANT or NANT. An off the shelf tool is probably not going to fit all of your needs and or your environment out of the box. The scripts wont likely be all the complicated and will fit into the various stages nicely.
Probably your biggest hurdle is in getting your designer comfortable with version control. At my shop this was a big issue. Designers want to move stuff around and have full control of there worksapce without being tied to the rigors of SVN.