What is the best practice for managing custom BMIDE templates?

The most effective approach for managing custom BMIDE templates is to use a source control management (SCM) system. This practice brings several advantages that are crucial for development activities.

By managing BMIDE templates in an SCM system, you ensure a centralized repository that facilitates collaboration among team members. This allows multiple developers to work concurrently on templates without overwriting each other's changes. Additionally, an SCM system maintains a detailed history of all modifications, enabling easy tracking of changes over time. This feature is invaluable when you need to troubleshoot issues or revert to a previous version of a template.

Moreover, SCM systems often provide branching capabilities, which allow for experimentation and development of new features without disrupting the main workflow. This fosters an environment where updates can be tested in isolation before being merged back into the primary set of templates.

In contrast, storing templates locally on a development machine can lead to version inconsistencies and makes it challenging to manage collaborations or restore previous versions. Similarly, manual versioning lacks the efficiency and control of an SCM system, making tracking changes cumbersome and error-prone. Creating backups on external drives, while useful, does not offer the same level of collaborative features or change tracking that an SCM system does.

In summary, utilizing an SCM system for managing custom BM