version control

For the past year, all of my Drupal work has been devoted to building a product on top of Drupal. In the beginning of the year, I worked with the Science Collaboration Framework to create PD Online. For the past 7 months, I have been with GoingOn building a social education platform on top of Drupal. I hope I will have the opportunity to tell you everything I have learned at Drupalcon in the Building a Product on top of Drupal session held by Tao Starbow and I.

Staging and deployment is a vital part of any project, Drupal or not. As I've discussed previously, staging and deploying to production is particularly difficult for all the Content Management Systems out there that intermingle content and configuration settings within the database - and Drupal is definitely one of them.

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:

Here's a quick bash script for automatically adding and deleting files in subversion. Don't you hate having to list each one individually? Or getting all those messages that say, "the file has already been added" when you just do svn add my/directory/*. Even more of a pain if you selectively delete a bunch of files.

I use this small little script. It's a huge time saver.

As I've mentioned before, version control with Drupal is tricky because a lot of configuration changes are stored in the database. Version control is vital because you should be maintaining multiple workspaces so you do not work on production. The last thing you want to do, then, is to make this worse by putting PHP in your nodes and blocks.

2bits wrote up a great post explaining that you should free your content of PHP. Yes! Read that! Follow it and add it to your Drupal bible.

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.