[development] Solving the dev->staging->live problem

[Kathleen Murtagh]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Alex Barth <alex at developmentseed.org> wrote:
> One additional thing I'm having in the back of my head is doing the same
> thing with content: Once we've figured out what's structure in our sites,
> the rest is content, right?
>

I have classified four types of data:

  * Configuration (structure)
  * Content
  * User
  * Ignorable

Configuration are things like the variables, blocks, cck type and
field definitions, etc  (you can configure settings.php to have unique
variable settings on dev and prod). Content is nodes, taxonomy, menu,
path, etc.  User data is users, comments, search, statistics,
watchdog, etc.  Basically, anything that tracks what a user is doing
(this is also stuff you generally don't need to track in development).

Ignorable data is cache and sessions - neither of which are
drastically harmful if you lose.  You don't store the data, but you
also don't erase it.  It lives only in the live database, and if the
live database is lost, it's not so bad to have to regenerate that
data.

The other possible "ignorable" data is the search index - this is sort
of a personal preference, I think.   By default, I have it categorized
as user data, but I think it could be ignored if needed for
performance reasons.

In a data classification plan, I think it would be important to leave
it flexible for a user to choose their own classification.  The search
index is one example of personal preference.

---
Kathleen Murtagh