After going through the pain of keeping separate repos, branches or even apps for content pages, my team migrated to simply using a CMS.
Wordpress is a bit of a pain, but we found Harmony (http://harmonyapp.com) to be great at serving pages with programmable themes (think haml, sass, etc) that marketing people can still edit without bothering a developer.
Well, the CMS is the classical way to do it. Using Jekyll and Github is a more recent and innovative way to do stuff, much simpler to use for developers and cheaper because it's free hosting that can scale pretty well.
Of course if you want marketing people to edit stuff asking them is use Git is going to be painful.
Install the GitHub app, then tell them to follow these steps: 1) Make your changes. 2) Write a word or two about the changes here (commit subject). 3) Press this button (commit) to record the changes. (repeat 1-3 if desired) 4) Press this button (sync) to sync your changes with your colleagues.
Yea, unfortunately this isn't the best setup for non-technical users, but I think it can still be decently done through the github editing features they recently added. I probably won't use this for some of our more content-heavy sites, but I've grown to appreciate hosting static content on Github pages.
At Teambox we have a comparable feature set (tasks for teams and files) and we moved to freemium about 2 years ago.
While the usual freemium math applies (most users are still free), our customer's response has been phenomenal and subscriptions are now a sustainable business.
What is botdylan for?
You can automatize any process in GitHub. Some of the things we are currently doing:
- Label issues with the status of the CI
- Show a cowboy image when someone posts directly to develop.
- Label issues that have 2 or more thumbs
- Post images on demand "image me..."
- Label issues with the status of the PR (mergeable or not)
- Ping inactive pull requests
- Post to Talker
- Create tasks