Several thoughts.

How much data do you have? One nice thing about CVS is being able to check out many copies at once. This gets very prohibitive on disk space.

How fast does it change? Remember that CVS archives the entire history of files. If your data changes fairly often, this archive can get huge.

When everything is released, do you want the release schedule for the website to be tied to the refresh of your data? I would guess not. If you don't then you don't want the data to be mingled in with the code versioning system. If you do, that is a big restriction that you should be clear about up front.

Speaking of which, your current development environment will be your default maintainance environment. Stop and think about that in solving these configuration questions. You are likely to live with this solution in other phases of your project and your answer should remain good.

For these and other reasons I would suggest that you use some sort of standard incremental backup system for your data files, and not have data in your version control system. Otherwise you are imposing several subtle restrictions on your clients. If they want to basically have a static, "About us" home page, the restrictions will not matter. If they want to have things like bulletin boards, news articles, file downloads, etc then the restrictions will likely turn out to be unacceptable.

In reply to RE (tilly) 3: Organization Redux by tilly
in thread Organization Redux by footpad

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