For the last couple of years, I’ve been working with another developer on one project. Once we started working in the same space, of course we started to overwrite each others work. I work from Montreal, Quebec and he works from New Brunswick. We needed a good solution for checking in/out files that was inexpensive and with minimal setup and expertise required. I also wanted to be able to publish the changes immediately, not having to keep to sets of data, updating the version control, then updating the production server.

I had seen this feature in Dreamweaver, but not stand alone.

I found this great little software called FfpVC. It met all my requirements, plus it has some version control features I wasn’t expecting:

• Version History with difference
• Difference between local/current files
• Email notifications of file updates

All this without a dedicated server software. The latest version corrected some small bugs that weren’t show stoppers but could be irritating.

I would recommend this as an inexpensive and effective version control system for any web development team, but especially if your team is distributed.