[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
Hi Frank,
This is a pretty big question.
Are you using an SCM at all? With that number of people I reckon the complexity of using things like trac and git become worth the complexity. git would solve a lot of collaborative problems, but how elegantly it does it (or rather, how much work there is for the guy bringing the bits back together at the end) depends on how well you can portion out the different lumps of work.
Having, as you say, each person running '... their own version control system ...' seems a little .. 1980's.
As for re-usable modules, this is always a challenge (and explains why there's regular threads on here about plug-in-able modues for auth, permissions, forums, etc) because every project is different. I put all my authentication stuff into a model, with a few related bits in MY_Controller and my generic helper - putting it all in a library may well work better for you, but you still have the underlying problem ... and that's only resolved if you guys have good communication, and a cleanly documented API to your common codebase.
As to central storage of js, css, and img files .. symlinks work well, as you observe. Attempts to stick with identical js (for example) across applications means that you're willing to do full testing across every app that uses a given lump of code if you decide to change that code at some point. Trade-off time - is that better than, effectively, maintaining several forks? So much depends on the discipline of the guys doing the coding I suspect. Oh, unless by static you meant read-only?
