Advice on website collaboration for Kubuntu users

Hi, all:

I have a question on tools for website design collaboration I need to "forum source".

I am designing a site with one other person. He and I both use Kubuntu (he's a bit more new to *Buntu than me).

I am the frontend and he's the back. I speak HTML and a smidge of CSS. He speaks PHP. I'm doing all the graphic design, copy, and essentially everything you "see". He's doing the scripting and DB design/hookup.

I use Kompozer (so I can do about 1/3 source, 1/3 tags, 1/3 WYSIWYG); he writes his PHP hard core. We've already had one accident where I downloaded a page with the extension .php; converted it to html, did some more design stuff on it, changed it back to php and re-upped it to the server. Unfortunately, just before I did that, he'd upped the same page with lots of php changes, and we lost his code.

Kompozer isn't a WYSIWYG php editor. Even if it was, we'd still have the problem of overwriting each other's code.

Does anyone have any suggestions? It's a big site, I'm typically doing design work on 5-6 pages at once, and it's impractical for us to be constantly updating each other on which pages we're working on. In addition, I lose his PHP updates when I convert to HTML to work on the design aspect in Kompozer.

We're both using Kubuntu; does anyone have any suggestions on how we can work more efficiently? Ideas, *ware, whatever. (comments about how I need to learn php are stipulated ;-) )

Thanks, all! Tarah

I use Mercurial (like Bazaar or Subversion) to handle this. Then again I have physical access to the server and can install anything I want on there. But Merc (or Bzr, or SVN) will keep the differences between file uploads to prevent such accidents as you described. That's the main reason I use it.

SVN (subversion), a version control system .. I too was a part of a large team working on a single website .. SVN worked like a charm .. It offers other advantages too