OVERVIEW
I have found that the trackdown package is incredibly useful for collaboration with non-R users. It's design suggests that the main use case was a group of researchers all working on one paper -- a big .Rmd file. The package documentation has a very clear workflow description.
I've put some wrappers and additional code around the package to make working with a couple dozen Distill pages.
This set of functions is handy for synchronizing more than a dozen .Rmd files by simplifying the following: