Drupal Camp Vancouver

Drupal and its contributed modules provides an impressive amount of functionality without needing to write a single line of code. This works by storing information in Drupal's database tables. Unfortunately this poses a challenge for developers wanting to stage changes between servers. The traditional method of just pushing up the code won't migrate everything, but you can't just push the entire database either for fear of deleting all your user-generated content. This talk will address these issues by describing the problem and looking at a variety of solutions as well as their pros and cons. These solutions include

- Migrating changes by hand
- Macros (devel macros, content copy, views export, etc)
- Keeping everything in code
- Database modifications to manage/isolate dev changes vs production changes
- Deployment modules (deploy, patterns, etc.)

This is one of the most talked-about problems for enterprise Drupal developers, and a solid background on the problems and their solutions is essential to a successful project.

This talk would be an expansion of a series of blog posts I wrote on this topic earlier in the year:

http://heyrocker.com/drupal/content/deployment-and-change-management-pro...
http://heyrocker.com/drupal/content/deployment-and-change-management-wha...
http://heyrocker.com/drupal/content/deployment-and-change-management-fra...