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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T23:38:38+00:00

Background: we are a small webdevelopment company. We have 5 programmers that produce 70%

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Background: we are a small webdevelopment company. We have 5 programmers that produce 70% of the time simple PHP websites (with some MySQL for news / product catalog / etc), and 30% of the time we work on larger projects (often custom-made ERP systems). We have a central server located at the office, use Linux among all users (and the server), and work by simply mounting the server and working in the directories (website projects) we need to work at. This currently works fine. There are two things that make me consider version control:

  • A pretty strong case by numerous websites, people, etc.
  • Potential problems that might arise in the future when the company grows and several people work on one project at the same time.

However, despite having people seen being hammered down when mentioning reasons not to use version control, I have a certain hesitation due to these points:

  • We do a lot of changes, but they are often very small changes.
  • It virtually never happens that we need to reverse a change.
  • We make frequent backups that can be used in case of needing something ‘previous’
  • It hardly ever happens that several people work on the same code at the same time. A project generally ‘flows’ from person to person, as different people are in charge of different development phases (HTML/CSS/PHP/MySQL)
  • When a project is more complicated, we assign it generally to one person.
  • We are pretty swamped with work right now

So I DO see benefits of version control, but I’m just concerned with the overhead it takes when developing a site. I have never used such a system before. And I feel that things are so easy and fast now, that we will lose time when using VC. Checking in, checking out, etc. adds up if you want to make 20 small changes to 20 different sites throughout the day. At least, that’s what I think. So my question is: should we switch to VC rather sooner than later, or should we not lose our time on this right now? Is it difficult to learn this? And finally, is GIT significantly more time-consuming (learning & using) than SVN? (I like the non-centralized aspect of GIT, but this is not a necessity).

NOTE: we all code using regular text editors like VIM or jEdit.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    With the scenario you have described, version control should be simpler to work with – and thus the overhead should be very low. For instance, with what you’re describing, all you’d basically have to do is (example of Git):

    1. Start work: git pull
    2. Do work (normally what you already do)
    3. git add . (in the top level directory)
    4. git commit -m "A quick message saying what you did"
    5. git push

    And that’s it.

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