Workflow: suggest a versioning and file control for Designer and Developer

Question

Our company are having hard time managing project files and managing versions of PSD, HTML, PHP, and CSS files.

Can anyone recommend a good software or workflow to handle files and versions.

Here's my common scenario:

I work for a project in my computer, it could be a Website mockup or a coding project. I then save all the files locally in my workstation. I'll then upload all the project files in the server connected in our network to have a backup. In my files, I usually append a "r1" for revisions, like
"WebsiteMockup_r1" or "WebsiteMockup_r2".

I need somehow to synchronize all my local files to the server and have some versions options.

Answer 1

For your HTML, PHP, CSS, and other text-based files, I recommend a source code management system like Git. You can host this on your own server, or use a third-party hosting solution such as GitHub. This will allow you to merge multiple people's changes, view the files as they were at any point in the past, and work on multiple new features/changes at the same time without messing things up. If you want some more information, this guide might be appropriate: Version Control for Designers.

(This will also work for your PSD files and any other files, but you won't be able to merge changes very well with these, just track version history.)

Git also supports tagging which will let you keep track of version names such as "v1".

Answer 2

jtbandes is on the right track, but I would not recommend Git (at least not initially). Perforce is free with certain constraints (depending on the size of your project), and it has good support for version controlling Photoshop PSD files.