Branches and review

When several designers work on one site, the risky moment is the save. A branch removes it: you design on a named copy, and the live project does not change until somebody merges.

1. Open a project and choose Branches.

2. New branch — name it after the work, not after yourself. Homepage hero v2 tells the team something; naseem-2 does not.

3. Open in editor. The editor opens the branch, says so in a banner, and every save from then on goes to the branch.

4. Review when you are done — then Merge.

What a review shows

A branch keeps whole snapshots of the design, not lines of text, so a review is described in the things you actually moved:

• Since this branch started — what you changed.
• Against the current project — what merging would do right now.

Those two are the same thing only while nobody else has published.

When they differ, the review names the pages both sides changed — not just “the project has moved”, which is true of almost every branch older than a day and so tells you nothing. Those named pages are the ones a merge overwrites.

And the check is made again at the moment you press Merge. If the project changed while you were reading the review, the merge is refused and the new review is put on screen — you can still merge, but not without seeing what arrived first.

Merging replaces the design

A merge makes the branch’s design the project’s design. It is not a line-by-line combine of two people’s edits — if two branches touched the same page, merge them one at a time and look at the second review again afterwards.

Nothing is lost on merge

DragGo saves a snapshot of the project as it was immediately before the merge, named after the branch. If a merge turns out to be the wrong call, that snapshot is what you go back to.

A merged branch stays in the list, marked merged, with who merged it and when.

Branches you abandon

Close branch parks one without merging it. It stays in the list marked closed, keeps its saves, and can be reopened later. A merged branch cannot be reopened — start a new one from the project instead.

Who can merge

Owners and editors. Viewers can open a branch and read the review, which is the point of the role — an opinion without a save button.

Tip

Branches are per project, and a project can carry several open at once. They are cheap: make one for anything you are not sure about.