[thelist] Organising client files

[Steve Clason]

On 1/21/2005 7:41 PM Tim Burgan wrote:

> How do you go about organising client files on your local computer.

There'll be as many answers as there are developers but I'll tell you 
what I do.

My workstation runs on WinXP. I have a folder in MyDocuments called 
clients (actually several because I do a lot of subcontract work and I 
have a folder for each company I sub for). Each client folder contains 
an 'htdocs' folder with the site files, an 'assets' folder with 
graphics, text documents etc., and an 'acct' file for invoices and 
administrative stuff.

A networked testing server runs a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) 
environment. I use DreamWeaver as an IDE, that makes it easy to upload 
files to the Linux box for testing and to the host for site deployment. 
It also means I have to create a new Apache virtual host on the Linux 
box for each client (and also a new entry in my Win hosts file), but 
that is trivial after the first few.

So, while actively working on a site I maintain two copies locally, one 
on my workstation and one on the Linux box.  I consider that a good 
thing. DW makes it easy to keep them synchronized. When I'm done with a 
site I generally clean it off the Linux box (because it has a small HD) 
and tidy up my workstation files, deleting unnecessary files and 
reorganizing if necessary.

I hope that helps.

-- 
Steve Clason
www.clason.org
(303)494-8285