How do large sites manage and keep track of their development cycle ?

Report · Nov 30, 2010

I am having to take on and debug a medium sized site which I did not build myself. The code is quite complex with a lot of self referencing code, conditionals and variable variables and a nest of functions. Taking on other people's code is always 10x harder to understand that your own.

In order to bring clarity to this rats nest I want to document the code so that if I have to back to it in 6 months I won't have to relearn it all over again.

So, other than pen and paper, standard flow charts are there prescribed methodologies for documenting sites ? How do the big boys do it ?

Thanks Vincej

Report · Dec 01, 2010

Hi

Many people use phpdoc or similar for php files, see - http://www.phpdoc.org/. It may also be worth your time to use a version control system such as subversion which is built into DW5.

Use comments in all your code during development, then remove them on the live version. No matter what you do, writing some documentation will have to be done using word or a text editor.

Exactly how you proceed will also depend upon how many people are involved in the project.

PZ