WinterRoot

Vision Tech for Counter Tech

Git is a powerful version control tool, so powerful, even more so than with subversion, you yourself define the strategy that you use to employ it’s features.  There are myraid ways of doing things and what’s best really depends on what you are doing.  In my opinion two of the most important features of git are the ability to easily track incremental commits during development without breaking the entire build for all users and it’s support for sharing commits between branches.  Both of these features solve major problems with subversion, in which there is no way to commit changes that aren’t ready for primetime while still retaining a readable revision history in the repository.

Beyond these features though, I have found a few capabilities within git that are ideally suited to web programming.  One is the use of the rebase option to update live sites while keeping those sites on version control.  Often, once a site is live either the installation environment or extensive use will uncover latent bugs in the build.  Sometimes it’s quickest to just fix these on the live site, and move them back into the repository trunk from there.  If the site is not on version control, copying of files is the only option, thereby losing detailed commit history.  On the other hand, a live site has different database and server settings, sometimes intermixed in settings file that have configurations that are global to both development and live installations.   Git rebase can be used to solve this in a slick way.

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One of my big projects through this year has been putting a lot of energy behind redesigning and rebuilding the Content Management System we routinely deploy at Made Of People, the interactive media collective started by my close collaborator Thiago deMello Bueno.  Over the years we’d created a collection of software for building out user editable websites in a highly customized way, but as our libraries grew it became more and more obvious that a low level rebuild of the entire system was going to be necessary.  We’ve moved the php core to Kohana and the Javascript to mootools, and created our custom tools on top of those libraries, giving us a fully Object Oriented Design paradigm and really opening up what we can do with the system.  As this development has proceeded this year, we’ve been very pleased to see our system deployed on a variety of sites.  Soon a demo will be available but in the meantime we’re happy to announce a few slick sites that have gone live on top of our framework:

Cartwheel IT:  http://cartwheelit.com/ - collaboration with Objective Subject

Toy.  : http://www.toyny.com/

Detroit Garden Works:  http://www.detroitgardenworks.com/ - collaboration with Motor City Publishing

I’ve wanted to help out our community bikeshop in the Cass area for while, so I finally arranged a trade where they would fix up a bike in exchange for some website work. We’ve replace their site with a Joomla installation (also giving me some additional experience with wrangling Joomla) and it’s a definate improvement. Check it out at http://www.thehubofdetroit.org/. It’s still in need of some serious design work, but that is on the way complete with an improved logo. The main piece of work left for me is the implementation of a ‘bike registry’ system. Basically this will combine a way for the shop itself to keep track of serial numbers of bikes they sell and a way for people in the community to show off their bikes. This way it can help to verify ownership and deter theft, as well as fostering excitement and interest about what’s going on with bicycles in Detroit. I’ve got a basic version of the component to achieve this already done, so expect something very soon.