This will sound crazy, but I recently deployed a content management workflow for a rails app that mounts a WebDAV drive inside of a staging rails application that's running http://sitepress.cc/ (think Middleman in Rails, without all the dependencies)
If the marketing team wants to edit something, they mount the content drive, make changes using their text editor of choice, and are able to preview when they hit Save.
After they make a bunch of changes and add whatever media an engineer copies the changes off of the drive into a commit and deploys to production.
So far it's been working pretty well. The marketing and CS team are all able to edit markdown copy and run it easier through their content editing processes since it's just files. They don't need to learn or care about git. Designers can throw images in the volume without thinking too much about it.
Engineering is happy because they control their git history and commits. When it's time to optimize PNGs, compress assets, etc. the engineer can deal with and deploy to product with confidence.
We also run rspecs against every single page of content to enforce SEO, branding, etc.
Happy to answer questions or write something more detailed about it if others are interested.
I setup winscp to automatically sync a directory from a coworkers laptop to a webserver so he can edit his html documents in Microsoft Frontpage locally and have it sync with the remote server.
I highly recommend Sheets too for tabular data. The series of /vs pages at (like https://www.polleverywhere.com/vs/turning-technologies) are all generated from one Google Spreadsheet. You can see the spreadsheet data itself if you click "Download Spreadsheet" and see the tables if you click on any of the subpages.
I implemented the "scraping" via a Rake task. When marketing updates a point of comparison, an engineer runs the task which simply downloads a CSV file that is plugged into these pages and a nicely formatted XLXS file that's made available for download for people who want to see all the data in one place.
I used to work at a project where I suggested doing EXACTLY this, because the customers were pretty old-school Microsoft Office users and we had to store lots of documents and organize them.
The idea never caught on because the people didn't find it as a good solution. Happy to see that somebody, somewhere out there has built exactly this and is happy with the outcome ;)
Your welcome! The engineering team got some chuckles out of me deploying WebDAV but it works! I originally wanted to use Dropbox to sync a shared folder, but their Linux client doesn't deploy well in a Docker container. The first attempt at a WebDAV server was nginx, but it had bugs in its WebDAV implementation, so we reached out for good 'ol Apache.
The whole thing feels so retro, but it works pretty well and makes it just that much more fun of a solution.
Wow, didn't expect this much interest! If you find https://sitepress.cc (or are an avid Middleman/Jeckyll fan) and these workflows interesting we're hiring a marketing engineer to make this pipeline even better. https://www.polleverywhere.com/jobs#marketing-engineer or reach out to me Brad at Poll Everywhere dot Com
> The unix command is sshfs remotehost:remote_dir local_dir.
That's not WebDAV, but using SSH/SFTP. Requires extra software on windows (either an SFTP client, or if you want the filesystem integration specifically there is a version of sshfs for Windows)
Basic WebDAV support is integrated in Windows Explorer, and has been for ages, but there are alternative clients (both paid and free) as well.
If the marketing team wants to edit something, they mount the content drive, make changes using their text editor of choice, and are able to preview when they hit Save.
After they make a bunch of changes and add whatever media an engineer copies the changes off of the drive into a commit and deploys to production.
So far it's been working pretty well. The marketing and CS team are all able to edit markdown copy and run it easier through their content editing processes since it's just files. They don't need to learn or care about git. Designers can throw images in the volume without thinking too much about it.
Engineering is happy because they control their git history and commits. When it's time to optimize PNGs, compress assets, etc. the engineer can deal with and deploy to product with confidence.
We also run rspecs against every single page of content to enforce SEO, branding, etc.
Happy to answer questions or write something more detailed about it if others are interested.