[support] Staging

[Victor Kane]

Hi Christopher,

There is no packaged answer to what you are looking for.

My forthcoming book, Leveraging Drupal
(http://www.amazon.com/Leveraging-Drupal-Getting-Your-Right/dp/0470410876,
not due out till December at the earliest), deals with this very
issue, with a real life development and deployment example. But it is
still a work in progress, and I am streamlining an approach that will
allow for a Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6.x transition.

Basically some of the conclusions I'm coming to confirm methods I have
been using with my clients, basically, making heavy use of an SVN
repository for deployment of the ./sites directory, while checking out
and updating Drupal core using CVS (simple command line one-liners).

Deploying changes to templates and custom modules is as easy as "svn
commit" and "svn update" and even that can be automated. I also rely
heavily on the new features of the drush and update status modules
using the SVN plugin.

The difficulty resides in the configuration and content using the
database at the same time in the different sites, so that programmers
working with, say, Panels 2, on the dev and test sites would need to
merge their database changes with the production database if the
client is close to launching and is putting in content at the same
time.

On this many have promised but few shared; perhaps because it is not
so simple and has heavy dependencies on concrete situations.

Others seem to be actually finding some solutions and are willing to
share them, notably Kathleen Murtagh in her blog article "Development
to Production: A Database Merge Script" and similar. See
http://ceardach.com/blog/2008/06/development-production-database-merge-script
.  She has authored the database scripts module, which looks like it
could be one of the promising building blocks for what you need,
alongside CVS and SVN.

Victor Kane
http://awebfactory.com.ar


On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 4:22 PM, Christopher M. Jones
<cjones at partialflow.com> 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.
> --
> [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>