Web Sites Using CVS

Just as software authors need a way to coordinate edits to software, so web page authors need a way to coordinate edits to web content. A few of the web sites who maintain their web content with CVS are:

Netscape

The Netscape Internet site was in 1997 the most heavily trafficked site in the world, serving close to 5 million users and receiving more than 120 million hits each day. The site provides both information and services. They maintain their web content with CVS (source: "Lessons Learned Administering Netscape's Internet Site", by Dan Mosedale, William Foss, and Rob McCool).

Student.com

Student.com's goal is to provide an interactive and interesting site where students can hang out, get some useful stuff, be entertained and entertain each other. David Sklar of Student.com writes:

" . . . CVS . . . gives us the ability to reproduce pages as they were in any state or at any time since their creation, as well as the ability to look at a log of all changes to any page and see who made what change when.

"I don't know what production systems others are using, but I am honestly shocked that a document-flow system that you might pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for wouldn't offer this capability . . . "

(source: "Web page archiving solution?" at the end of "Looming Loss of Legal Notices Revenue Due to Internet", Steve Outing, Editor & Publisher Interactive, 8 Dec 1997).

For technical details on how they do things, see David Sklar's page on the subject. Lots of good ideas there topics such as moving content around between live web servers and development servers that developers use in writing their content, integrating changes by several developers (for example, what he calls a "staging server manager" is sometimes called an "integrator" in software development), and other topics.

Johns Hopkins ACM

The Johns Hopkins chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery has a CVS server which they use to maintain web pages. They have cvsweb running, to allow browsing the files under CVS.

Being added to this page

We expect future additions to be primarily via reciprocal links. To participate, first add some link from your site to a Cyclic web page. For example, mention your use of CVS on an "about our web server" page, put "powered by CVS" on one of your pages, or whatever location makes sense for use. Then tell us the location of your CVS page.

If you are interested in giving details about your use of CVS in your web pages, that is great too. Good things to mention are (1) how many web authors use CVS on how many platforms, (2) the size of your web site (megabytes, number of hits, whatever), and (3) anything you have to say about why CVS is good choice for you.

You are encouraged to use one of the CVS logos if you so desire (but this is totally up to you).

Although we generally expect to link to pages which follow the above criteria, we reserve the right to decide what to link to.