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

[Dave Cohen]

In your model taxonomy is "content" while variables are "configuration".  
Let's say on my site, one of my taxonomies is "privacy" with terms 
like "public", "administrator only", etc...  Further I configure one of the 
taxonomy access control modules to use my privacy terms.

In my mind those terms are part of "configuration" (while other terms might be 
considered "content").

While in your model as I understand it, I now have some variables 
(configuration, of the access control module) referring to my term ids 
(content).  So the line is crossed, I can't replicate the configuration 
unless I also replicate the content.  If I understand you correctly.

I say this trying to point out that we can't simply divide Drupal's database 
into "content" tables and "configuration" tables.  Unfortunately is will 
never be that simple.  There are many examples like this where the line 
between content and configuration is fuzzy.

While I'm pessimistic about that particular idea, I'm optimistic about the 
UUID idea being discussed in the "Unique/Random IDs and drupal" thread.  I 
think using UUIDs rather than sequential ids will solve a big huge chunk of 
the dev->staging->live problem.

-Dave


On Tuesday 12 August 2008, Kathleen Murtagh wrote:
> 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.