Subversion for Designers? For Clients?

One of the great things about subversion is that you can have a centralized repository of resources with the ability to access any version and to handle branching and merging. It's also fairly straightforward to create an automated build process for testing and production servers, but how do you incorporate assets that you don't control into the build?

Dealing with Designers
We build most of our apps for agencies/design firms who often then want to be able to customize the view templates using something like Dreamweaver to tweak the look and feel of the HTML and css to meet their end clients needs. This is great as it means we don't have to deal with small look and feel changes (which can be a real time sink), but we run into issues with overwriting of templates because even though we make heavy use of view helpers to abstract logic, sometimes we have to make changes to the same templates our design partners are working on and occasionally that becomes an issue.

At first, the solution seemed obvious - move the templates to source control. Unfortunately, for people you don't control and who have no background in software, persuading them to use a svn plugin for Dreamweaver and then to fire off an Ant build task to see every tiny change they make in a template is a hard sell. Also, with the number of small changes they make, the number of commits would be an issue. A local development environment is also a non starter as they don't want to mess with web servers locally and often need to show changes in real time to remote end clients.

I've been thinking about setting up a "design server" which would automatically check out a version of the code that they could then work on and I'd run some kind of scheduled task to commit the code every night for which changes had been made or something. That way the designers could continue to use Dreamweaver and FTP to play with the files and I'd hide svn while still getting most of the benefits (they wouldn't be able to roll back to same-day changes, but that hasn't been a request).

Any thought on a seamless way to get HTML designers you don't control or have strong influence over to fit into a source control based workflow?

Coping with Clients
Another issue is finding the best way to handle files uploaded by end clients using a content management system. In some ways it would be very nice to commit such changes to svn as it would allow for svn to provide full snapshots of the entire web application and would mean that automated builds from svn could be used for recovery if a web server failed.

The other approach would be to have a separate solution for backing up client files, but it seems a little strange to have two separate backup/snapshot solutions which would then need to be manually synchronized to successfully restore a server - one for code and another for other files/assets. I suppose again the other solution would be to treat a certain directory on the production server as a checkout from svn and to automatically commit to source control for every day that files had changed.

Any thoughts on the practicalities of automating commits? Any thoughts on mixing up template, code and possibly file commits into a single system? On the one hand it would be nice to have a central repository of everything required to rebuild a site - on the other would the code changes and commits be overwhelmed by all of the noise being generated by the automated file and template commits?

Any thoughts appreciated!