I am developing a website using CodeIgniter and PHP. Some of my friends suggest I start using Subversion to take care of my organization. Could someone give me a basic explanation of what SVN is without the jargon and also if it is practical for a framework where 5 files are needed to run a single page?
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Subversion allows you to store your source in a central location, make changes from multiple places (ie. laptop, desktop), track changes and revert changes to your source tree if needed.
Have you ever made a big ‘improvement’ and then decided you were going in the wrong direction? With Subversion you can revert to the version of your source before you started heading off in the wrong direction.
Or how about this, you make some subtle changes to the codebase, but don’t notice that you introduced a new bug until much later. You can use subversion to revert to previous code versions, helping you track down the change that introduced the bug.
It is more valuable when sharing the source with multiple developers, but even for my single developer projects I find it very handy to have all my source and changes in a Subversion repository.
If you combine it with Trac, you can then keep track of bugs/features, milestones, and use the Trac Wiki to document your project.