deployment

I finally decided that what I've been developing in the dbscripts module is stable and decent enough to deserve an official 1.0 release. I've written up the problem I was trying to solve with these scripts in another blog post.

So what are some improvements I've done since I first released it? Besides refactoring and cleaning up the code, I have added:

There are virtually an unlimited amount of ways to set up a development environment, and it all depends upon your project's individual needs and your preferred workflow. Sometimes, though, it just takes experience and exposure to other ideas to figure out what would be best. So, here is a description of my development environment.

Migrating changes from development to production is particularly tricky in Drupal due to a large amount of configuration settings being stored within the database. Attendees of Drupalcon 2008 made it clear that this is a particularly annoying problem. I attended the Development / Test / Production Environments panel to learn about how the big guys (including Drupal.org itself) manage deploying their sites from one working space to the next. We were disappointed to discover that even the big guys are currently writing down all the steps to upgrade and simply performing them on the production server.

This method poses several problems due to the Human Element being involved in the entire process.

Despite how much I love working with Drupal for my content management needs, it's largest problem is version control. A significant portion of a Drupal site's configuration lies within the database. And, despite how much I love CCK, seemingly minor changes to content types make major schema changes to the database.

All of this means that merging a development version of the site with the production site's data is complicated at best.