[support] Staging

[Zohar Stolar - Linnovate]

Hi Christopher,


First of all, I advise you to consider cross-posting the mail in the 
development list. While you need a straight answer, which is kind of a 
support request, your insights might make others re-think how Drupal's 
database is built, and how we can make it (even) easier to develop 
Drupal site over many years.


Secondly, I was wondering with yhager about having a BoF meeting in 
Szeged, since the situation you are experiencing is one of the most 
common issues with Drupal development. Since Configuration and Content 
are kept on the same DB, it is practically impossible to export only 
some of the data (for example only content, or only configuration).

We were wondering how come everyone is suffering, and no one speaks :)  
We finally let go of the idea.


However, if there is enough interest, maybe we can still organize a BoF 
in Szeged. And that's the second reason why I think you should 
cross-post in the dev list - maybe we'll see that there is enough man 
power to advance in this matter soon.


oh... and... sorry for the situation you're in, Unfortunately, I don't 
have a winning advice ;-)


Zohar Stolar
Linnovate - Community Frameworks
zohar at linnovate.net
http://www.linnovate.net
Tel. +972-77-5345-704
Cel. +972-52-8348-278
Fax. +972-72-2500-882
SkypeID: zstolar
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/drupal



Christopher M. Jones wrote:

> 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.
>