[development] The right way to manage Drupal webiste development

[Michel Levy-Provençal]

Hi,

We are 4 developpers using Drupal to realize Blogs and news portals.
We use SVN to share drupal PHP code.
Each developper has his own instance on his computer with his
setting.php and mysql database.

This is fine for a one shot development... BUT, (there is a but...)

1/ When we make some changes using the admin interface on a developer
instance, we have to extract the DB and restore it into the
integration instance... At this time each developper must import the
integration DB in his instance each time there's an update. It's a
huge work to determine what table is a content table, param table or
system table...

2/ When our sites will be online, we will need to continue the
development. The only way we found to manage this is to lock param
tables on the live instance. And when we'll want to update the live
website, we'll have to :
 - update the php code (thanks svn)
 - and (this is quite touchy) update the param tables using a sql import....

This is the only way we found today to manage our devs...
We are looking for some best practice on this subject.

Do you know http://drupal.org/project/DAST ? Do you think it can be a solution?

-- 
Michel Lévy-Provençal
+336 23 93 60 16 | mikiane.com