Website editing and updating revision tracking

September 14, 2007 8:30 AM

I need a tool that does website editing and updating revision tracking, meaning whenever a change is published to the website, a record of the change is recorded in some way.

This is for a project that involves a site with maybe ten flat HTML files. For legal reasons, they need to track all published changes they make. Yes, I know MediaWiki does this, but I don't want to install MediaWiki for something so simple, for one. Also, the people I'm making the site for need to be able to make changes themselves, so MediaWiki includes an additional learning curve (we are talking about people with no HTML or coding knowledge and limited web experience.).

So far, the only idea I've come up with is to use Adobe Contribute with the plugin built into Microsoft Word (something they are quite comfortable with), and use the revision tracking that comes built into Word. Will this work? Are there any better ideas? I have had a hell of a time finding any good web tools for revision tracking.

I have also considered maybe writing a perl module that copies the web pages to an archive directory any time changes are made, but I wouldn't know how to implement it. The other idea (since they just need to record changes), is to somehow use WGET on their Windows 2003 server to just download the website every night to their backup drive. That would perhaps be a suitable compromise. Your suggestions are much appreciated.

posted by chlorus to computers & internet (7 comments total)

CVS?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:33 AM on September 14, 2007

Blazecock Pileon: Installed on the website? This looks like a client/server thing, and the users are running Windows XP btw. This looks very useful though.
posted by chlorus at 8:36 AM on September 14, 2007

CVS for Dreamweaver?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:42 AM on September 14, 2007

If you don't want to install something as complex as MediaWiki just to get versioning, what about other wikis?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:47 AM on September 14, 2007

This is what subversion and other revision control systems are for.
posted by dmd at 9:15 AM on September 14, 2007

all changes are made in a staging area. When the changes are done, a script is run that checks the staging area into version control and then updates the directory of published pages from the copy in the version control system.
posted by Good Brain at 9:22 AM on September 14, 2007

How about finding the simplest CMS that features both WYSIWYG editing and revision tracking? If you're lucky there'll be something that's less painful than cobbling together your own system.
posted by malevolent at 9:27 AM on September 14, 2007