Here are two approaches that migrate changes from dev to live (and to other developers' instances). They both involve some low-level database stuff, which may make them not suitable for the average Drupal user. I'm no expert in the projects you listed, but I think these two address some things the others do not. http://drupal.org/node/181128 http://www.dave-cohen.com/node/1779 There was some discussion about this sort of thing at DrupalCon Boston. No clear best practices came from that BOF: http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/session/updating-and-upgrading-live-sites http://www.mikiane.com/node/2008/03/04/live-blogging-drupalcon-boston-2008 -Dave On Monday 24 March 2008, Angela Byron wrote:
At Drupalcon, there was all kind of talk around challenges like how to manage a collection of multisite installs, how to do things like run cron or update.php on 60 gazillion sites, how to enable/disable "packages" of modules/functionality to avoid having to click through 10,000 things, how to migrate database changes from one site to another, etc.
I'm planning on spending a few hours this week trying out various Drupal packaging/site provisioning systems and writing up a report comparing/contrasting them.
Here are the modules I know about in this space:
http://drupal.org/project/patterns: Module/system configurations that can be run at any time
http://drupal.org/project/hostmaster: Bryght's multisite hosting managed site deployment framework, which includes http://drupal.org/project/hosting and http://drupal.org/project/provision
http://drupal.org/project/autopilot: Migrate changes from dev to live
http://drupal.org/project/deploy: Migrate changes from dev to live
http://drupal.org/project/drush: Command-line tool containing a bunch of useful commands such as running cron, downloading modules, etc.
Any others I should be taking a look at?
-Angie