I’m about to walk into a project that will have files (mostly PHP) behind web root. I traditionally use Dreamweaver CS4 for development. For upload I’ll do a hybrid of Dreamweaver and manual FTP. As a site gets larger and more complex keeping files straight by hand becomes painful (and dangerous) very quickly.
If you are facing similar issues, what are you using? What is the best way to handle this sort of thing? It’d be great if DW was aware of the idea of placing files behind web root, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to handle this elegantly.
I think that you might want to check out revision control like Subversion. It does a very good job handling your changes and deploying it to the appropriate server (staging/production). You can even find fairly inexpressive solutions that will do it all for you (meaning once you make a change and send your changes to Subversion /commit/ then Subversion will send them to your sever automatically (or you can do it manually with a click of a button). You can also use Subversion for free, but then you would have to set it up yourself.
The only problem that I see — I dont think that Dreamweaver CS4 does not support the latest version of Subversion.
You can also check out Git
I hope that helps.