help with managing large projects

in particular versioning & checking for unused functions

[lethal0r]

i have a website which I have 2 versions of:

the public live site
a private beta site which is continually being worked on

i copy files from the beta site to the live site at regular intervals.

i dont quite know what im looking for here, but im hoping to find something that will help me keep track of code updates, versioning etc.. maybe some software or some coding practises?

also is there any way of checking for obsolete functions that are no longer called?

hope someone can point me in the right direction.

thanks, tom

[Habtom]

is there any way of checking for obsolete functions that are no longer called?

I have no idea if there is such a thing, may be somebody here can point out if any, but if the project is big you might need to right a function or so, to open up your files and check if a function's name is mentioned anywhere else in the pages. That way you know if the function is being used or not.

Habtom

[phparion]

Managing Big Projects is a very deep topic and even hundred plus posts might not cover it. let me give you a guideline and few terms that you can google to study them and understand them and once you start to practice them you will be easily handling big projects or even medium scale projects or why not to accomplish small projects with proper methodology?

Google and Study

1 - Software Development Models
to understand which development methodology you should pick for a project depending on the analysis report

2 - Pattern Factory
How to implement a proper policy for the development to keep the code base organized and globally understandable within a team or outside team.

if you would have implemented a Pattern Factory you would not have any problem in keeping your code updated and tracking un-necessary code etc

3 - OOD
very necessary for big projects I believe structure programming is no good for big projects. you should follow OOD to be able to reuse your code and make most of the code independent as modules. e.g if you have an OOD for your project you can easily track which function is no longer used, a very bad way could have been to comment the certain function and check the website and website would give errors wherever that function call is made.

[lethal0r]

thank you. time to start reading :)

[jatar_k]

take a look at CVS [en.wikipedia.org] or subversion [subversion.tigris.org]