Working on rails projects with outsourced design team

Ruby on Rails
1

I’m looking for tips for working on a rails projects with an outsourced design team. Designers in a company I work for prepare the designs and send them to another company which transforms the designs into CSS/HTML/JS. I’m now looking for a way to allow some changes in CSS/HTML/JS while I can still continue integrating designs and working on the project. Both companies use GIT but for now the two processes are separated.

It seems like the easiest way would be for the company to learn haml/coffeescript/rails basics, clone the git repository where the app is being actively developed and commit changes there. However I believe this is a lot to ask from a company that has developed it’s own process during the years. I also believe this same company does a lot of work for other teams working with symphony/static sites etc.

Does anyone have any useful advices on how to tackle this problem? Thanks a lot!

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I am a huge, unabashed Haml fan and advocate, but I think you should avoid using it for a project where your design team is not someone you’re going to work with long-term (and therefore won’t be as interested in investing in themselves) and they already don’t know Rails.

If they are proficient with Git then I think that having them do ERB in place on High Voltage pages and layouts is probably the easiest way to go. You’ll have to copy/translate their work over to dynamic views, but it will result in the least amount of squandered time. You are paying the outsourced team to do design, so you want to extract every useful piece of design smarts and work you can out of them for every dollar you spend.

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