Accessing Your Webspace
Every Verb account comes with webspace. By default, your website will be made available at http://<accountname>.verbsite.com/. You may also point a domain name to your webspace.
To add or edit files on your webspace, you may use FTP. We do not support any other method of direct access, such as SFTP, WebDav, FrontPage, or SSH. We do, however, provide access to a Subversion repository and the ability to deploy directly to your webspace from Subversion.
FTP
To access your website via FTP, use an FTP client to connect to <accountname>.verbsite.com at port 21. The FTP username is the same as the account name and the password is whatever FTP password you set when creating the website. To change the FTP password, go to the Verb > FTP/Subversion tab.
Once logged in to FTP, you will be at the root of your webspace. By default only two things are in the root directory: a placeholder index.html page and a folder called error_docs, which contains the templates that will be rendered if a server error occurs on your website.
Many Verb designers create the following folders at the root of their webspace: assets. emails, fonts, images, javascripts, and stylesheets. They place Flash (.swf) assets into the assets folder, VerbML E-Mail templates (for eCommerce) in the emails folders, font files (for rendering text in custom fonts) into the fonts folder, and images, stylesheets, and javascripts into their respective folders. You do not have to structure your website this way, but this is the conventional Verb site layout that is used by most current Verb designers. By sticking to this pattern, you will make it easier for another Verb developer to work on your site in the future.
Recommended: An Editor With Built-In FTP
Because VerbML will only be parsed in pages that are accessed from your Verb hosting, we recommend that developers edit their HTML pages live on the server. It is easy to do this by using and editor with an integrated FTP client. The entire Verb team is using » Coda on the Mac, but other designers are using » BBedit, » Zend Studio, and » Smultron (free). We strongly recommend Coda and find the Coda + Verb workflow to be very speedy and smooth.
Subversion
Verb also provides a Subversion repository for each website. Advanced designers or teams of designers may elect to use Subversion instead of direct FTP access for publishing their website. Designers who use this workflow typically use the Verb Local Development Environment to preview pages locally before checking them into Subversion and then deploying them onto the live webspace.
To use Subversion, you should first create a user on the Users tab that has Subversion permissions. You can then check out a local copy on your local machine. To do that, open a terminal and type:
svn checkout http://svn.YOURSITE.verbsite.com/
(be sure to replace YOURSITE with your site name). By default, Subversion will assume that your Verb username is the same as your current UNIX or Mac login name. You will be prompted to enter a password for that username. If your username is different, just hit enter and Subversion will prompt for the correct username.
After entering your username and password, your Verb site will be checked out locally. You may then use standard Subversion commands (such as svn stat, svn commit, etc.), as well as launch the Verb Local Development Environment preview server.
Note that we do not ever import the contents of your FTP root into the Subversion repository. So your first checkout will always be an empty repository, even if you have files in your FTP. It is your responsibility to commit these files to Subversion.
If you plan to use branching in Subversion, please check out the documentation for the Verb > FTP/Subversion tab for information on how to tell Verb which branch is the active branch that should be deployed.
For more information on Subversion, please see the » Subversion book.
