I create websites for people. I have given them the ability to edit certain areas of their published pages using CushyCMS. That works fine, and everyone is happy with it.
When I go to publish some of my more extensive changes, I first need to pull down the latest version that they have produced. Then I make my changes, and upload everything to production.
I would like to use some sort of version control in this process. This should be a classic update-edit-commit-publish workflow, but I'm not sure how to go about this. Basically I want to avoid pulling down everything locally and doing the commits. I only want to pull down what has changed.
I use filezilla, and it doesn't do a good job of identifying changed files. I can't rely on the filesize, because sometimes it stays the same. I can't rely on timestamps because the server time is different than my machine, and it never seems to work correctly.
How can I get around my problem? I use Notepad++, Subversion and FileZilla, but I'm willing to try other tools if they would make this process easier.
I found that it was easiest to use a tool like Beyond Compare to handle the synchronization.