Neocities Website Sandbox Collaboration

[abacus]

On the "The Forum is Shutting Down" forum post, madness brought up creating a collective website for a group of people to work on. I actually wanted to try this out and do it with some friends as a way to have fun and learn HTML and CSS together. They brought up:

Another thing I think would be cool is if we worked on collective websites rather than personal websites. Wouldn't it be really nice if you met people that you trusted enough and were comfortable enough with that you could share an account and build a website together?

I am coming at this as a complete outsider to how people collab on such things so there may be an obvious answer here.

I wanted to focus on the sharing the account portion of this. Does anyone have any guidance or experience with this? Would I essentially have to create a new e-mail, register it on neocities, and give that log-in info to my friends? That doesn't seem too bad, especially with a small number of people!

I was searching it up on the web and there was a lot of techie talk about "Source Control" or "Version Control". Also, isn't GitHub the place to share files and stuff? Could I use that?

Thanks!

[Starfia]

GitHub came to my mind before I reached your last paragraph. I'm just a beginner there, but I know the unit of GitHub is a "repository," which is essentially just a shared collection of code files, analogous to a project folder on your hard drive. (So a web site is no problem.) Collaborators take a copy of the files they want to update, work on them, and then submit them back. One person is typically responsible for deciding which updated versions of those files make it back into the repository ("source control"), but that workflow mechanism is certainly designed around that kind of group-based work. That idea can feel like a lot if you're new to it, but maybe an hour of reading and studying helps you start to get the hang of it.

[abacus]

Thanks! Yeah I saw the word "Git" being thrown around with the searches I made, and I was like "hmm that reminds me of GitHub". Then I realized that it may be what I am looking for. I've used it before for uploading stuff to professors for class projects but never used it for myself, so this will definitely be a rabbit hole dive. I'm sure some answers will be answered the deeper I go.

[loaf]

Github is almost certainly the way to go. Git's the specific software used locally for source control, GitHub is an online database that keeps track of projects.

Using GitLab CI/CD and the Neocities API, it should also be possible to automatically update your website on neocities whenever someone makes a change to your GitHub repo... okay, just googled it, there is a tutorial on how to do this kinda thing, though it probably looks pretty intimidating if you haven't worked with GitHub before.

I'm also interested in doing a project like this, (maybe we'll do something like that on Ray's web raft?), so I might try this out, and make a tutorial that's more friendly for non-tech people.

EDIT: apparently, the neocities CLI has a command to set up a git hook that should do the uploading step much simpler

[abacus]

Thanks for taking the time to post these helpful links! I joined Ray's forum too so I may see you there. I'd love to try and figure out how to do it. I'm gonna have to figure out how to explain to my friends how to do it though which will be interesting lol.