So I've recently spoken to some old colleagues about how they use SVN to release their site code and realized that there is still not a lot of common use of a release process. They suffer due to their time constraints since they've had little time to review and it can be daunting to take on the task of redefining a new aproach to this technology if you're really crunched for time. On the other hand, it can also be very nerve wracking when you're pushing code by updating a folder because if there's an issue a code roll-back is manual. I've been shown a solution to this challenge myself so I thought it would be good to put up an article giving an easy straight forward way for you to upgrade your approach without too much difficulty. If you can't retrofit your project in the way I'll show, you should be able to at least find another way once you understand the principles behind it.
Recently I was required to take over the hosting of our SVN server and had the opportunity to take the existing system, which was a good base, and rebuild some parts of the it to meet some of our evolving business needs. I spent a lot of time reading about all the features of SVN and other version control systems as well as testing and redesigning it until I found the right balance of structure and security. I hope that what I learned as a result will help you as a web developer know what you can do with your repository and hopefully take some of the strain out of managing your environment. I do know there are a lot of other versioning systems out there and I'm not going to go into which you should use over another here. If that's what you're looking for you can read up here in an article written by Smashing Magazine. It's also worth noting that different programming languages have far different paradigms for code structure and this article may completely miss the point for you. I'm working in a .NET Web Application environment so bear that in mind.