Annoyed of the necessity of creating packages with recent items in order to share that with your colleagues? Tired of items' versioning? Why not to version those items in source control then?
My favorite tool for achieving that is Unicorn. It does exactly what it suppose to - syncs certain Sitecore items (recursively with children) within a directory, as configured, so that you are able to check-in the folder with all serialized items, so that your colleagues can sync that changes into their database; that means new features / fixes deliver items deltas simultaneously with their code counterparts.
Here is the example of configuration, whatever sits under mentioned paths (recursively) will be serialized:
The greatest thing I love about Unicorn is simplicity - as simple as the following:
- It installs as NuGet package.
- Consists of 2 DLLs and a config patch file.
- Just one control page at the web root to perform sync / revert
- Simple configuration file.
From limitations I would only mention recursiveness - specifying an item in config processes it will all child items and that cannot be overridden. Of course, this is not a problem in more advanced solution - TDS, but are we here about simplicity?
Installation from NuGet Package Manager Console:
PM> Install-Package Unicorn
See also: GitHub source code
Update: now version 3 has been released with great, even revolutionary, changes and it became more friendly. So, please read: