Development permissions

[Paul M. Foster]

Folks:

This is probably a stupid question for many of you, but I've been 
struggling with it since I started using Linux in 1996.

Say you have a directory in which there are development files. A number 
of users will be creating, deleting and modifying the files there. This 
is the type of situation which might have been common on old Unix 
university systems. (Users might be accessing files via Samba, NFS, or 
locally.)

Just to make this more concrete, assume the development tree is in 
/var/www/html/website.

Without setting directory and file permissions to 777, how do you allow 
the above? What combinations of groups, directory owners/permissions and 
file owners/permissions might make this possible?

Paul