<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On 09 Aug 2008, at 9:53 PM, arthur wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; ">I think a really interesting project is the deploy module (<a href="http://drupal.org/project/deploy">http://drupal.org/project/deploy</a>) which I think is an interesting abstract approach to this issue. It won't meet everybody's needs, and isn't functionally sufficient yet (for content at least), but is a good start, and worth starting a more serious conversation of how this problem might be addressed from the larger Drupal community. Some of the concepts that Greg has already got in place are critical for the staging issue. You can check out a talk Greg did on the deploy module at the Seattle Drupal User Group here:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://blip.tv/file/1033300">http://blip.tv/file/1033300</a><br></span></blockquote></div><br><div>Deploy uses macros, essentially. It captures form submissions and resubmits them to the other sites.</div><div><br></div><div>The entire drupal_execute / macro functionality was one of the tertiary goals of the initial design of fapi, unfortunately we didn't make the</div><div>design water tight, so it was possible (easy in fact) to write forms which didn't work with macros. We would have to vet all the existing forms, </div><div>and tighten up the API to force it to work consistently across all forms, to make deploy work in all cases. A good example of this not working</div><div>is that cck 1.x forms. cck_import broke most of the time because the forms weren't built to work consistently with drupal_execute.</div><div><br></div><div>Additionally, deploy only works one way. Which doesn't help in cases like this (where content/configuration needs to be moved both directions).</div><div>The moment you modify anything on the live site, you run into the problem where it's impossible to merge the changes back, without wiping the</div><div>staging / dev database, and resubmitting everything.</div><div><br></div></body></html>