[development] [Fwd: [support] Staging]

[Zohar Stolar]

I was too late :)
I advised you NOT to cross post the message again. Here's a quote from 
the support list:
"
Since you raised this issue, it has been extensively discussed on the 
development list (see threads: "Solving the dev->staging->live problem" 
and "Unique/Random IDs and drupal")
"


Read those threads and you'll understand how deep the problem is.



Christopher M. Jones wrote:

> I have been looking for a clean solution to the problem of how to 
> stage a drupal site, using the common dev->QA->production development 
> cycle. I originally posted to [Support], but someone there suggested 
> that I post my questions here, as well. My original message follows 
> below.
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [support] Staging
> Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:22:54 -0400
> From: Christopher M. Jones <cjones at partialflow.com>
> Reply-To: support at drupal.org
> To: support at drupal.org
>
> I'm looking for a decent approach to staging a drupal site. The
> production site will be a collaborative authoring project, with forums,
> blogs, and lots of media. The client will have access to this site, and
> will be maintaining some of the content. Other content will be
> maintained by us.
>
> The development company that hosts this project prefers to make all of
> their changes, both to content and templates, in a testing environment.
> Once their client has approved the changes, they like to 'push' them to
> production.
>
> However, while these changes are taking place, the client may be
> administering forums and writing blog posts in the -production- version.
>
> To further complicate things, my company wants a three-stage cycle. They
> want a dev site, where they make changes for in-house review, which they
> then push to testing for client review before everything is pushed to
> production.
>
> I'm unsure how to approach this. The site in question has always been
> static html created in Dreamweaver. At some point they started adding
> other things, so now there are two wordpress blogs, and two phpbb
> forums. The forums and blogs presently are excepted from the development
> cycle. They simply appear to be part of the site, because their
> templates have been designed so. But that means that we've got to
> propagate template changes across five templates. Things are breaking
> constantly, and this is why I piped up to them about drupal.
>
> I've seen a lot of discussion about this topic, but I really need some
> hard answers. What should I do?
>
> I've seen the Staging module for 6.x. Is it safe to use? If so, then we
> could use that for the database. Templates could be pushed with rsync or
> svn... whatever. But would this work two ways? Could we sync the dev /
> testing sites to the production site, then sync the other way? Would we
> need to?
>
> Also, I envision using a multisite environment so that all sites share
> the same modules, media, etc, but use different templates.
>
> I desperately need the detailed advice of someone with experience, here.

-- 
Zohar Stolar   |   זהר סטולר
z.stolar at gmail.com <mailto:z.stolar at gmail.com>
Tel. +972-(0)77-5345-704
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