Build Systems & Change Management

This group is for the discussion of change management and build management strategies for Drupal. As Drupal is maturing, it's clear that from an ROI basis controlling the costs of change management will become a significant competitive and technological advantage that will drive Drupal forward in a big way. This group was set up to discuss strategies for successfully managing change, including technical components.

larskleiner's picture

Senior developer | Digital People Online

Employment type: 
Contract
Telecommute: 
Not allowed

We need a Senior developer with Drupal deployment experience to write a database deployment script. We reckon this contract will be for about 3 weeks.

Digital People Online (http://www.digitalpeopleonline.com) is a small digital agency based in Camden.

No agencies please.

adrian's picture

A critical look at the implementation of Plugin Manager - Underlying issues and possible solutions

I have been harboring some growing concerns about the direction of the plugin manager integration proposals for Drupal core almost since their inception, but have not been able to make an informed opinion on the subject until I had properly reviewed the proposed system on a much deeper scale.

While my impressions of the project and the current implementation are fairly negative, I have aimed to frame my criticisms in a positive constructive manner because I believe that the goals of the project are worthwhile, and that for a large section of users this could be a very flexible and usable solution.

Unfortunately a lot of my concerns have been well founded, and I believe that the implementation of this system needs to be taken in a different direction for it to be able to succeed in its goals, while not negatively affecting projects like Aegir, Open Atrium and many other ‘serious developers’.

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Separate core/module Configuration and Content = Staging/Configuration APIs

For the Drupal sites I am working on I have a setup using three different stages:

  1. R&D site - This one is for both testing contributed modules and my own development.
  2. Staging - A virtual copy of the live site to make sure that the things from the R&D site will work. Also used for testing updates/upgrades to core and contributed modules before they go live.
  3. Live site - Simply the live public site where all ends up after passing the two above.
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Chris Charlton's picture

Do you test new modules before uploading them to your live site?

I test every module I download before installing it on my live site(s).
64% (77 votes)
I have tested some modules before deploying.
26% (31 votes)
I have not tested any modules before uploading them to my site.
2% (3 votes)
I have not tested any modules, but really should.
6% (7 votes)
I code every module I use and never, ever need to test my own code.
2% (3 votes)
Total votes: 121
26 comments

Managing Drupal development for small distributed teams

This is a long post, grab a cup of tea... (or better still a beer)

I manage a small team (currently 3 soon 5) of grographically distributed developers developing and maintaining a few (currently 4) projects in different stages of the lifecycle. I am familiar with managing teams developing web applications but up until now my Drupal experience has been largely solo. Developing large Drupal projects and working in a team is relatively new to all the other devs so I see this as an opportunity to encourage a sound development process using the appropriate tools.

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Release Management Engineer | ReachLocal, Inc.

Employment type: 
Full time
Telecommute: 
Not allowed

Release Management Engineer (Woodland Hills, CA)

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RPM / SRPM Packages For Fedora - Any Interest?

I'm using Drupal on Fedora. Specifically, I'm using an RPM installation of Drupal 6.9 that I backported to Fedora 8. As it's way too easy to screw up an RPM-based installation of pretty much anything by mixing in code outside of the pkg mgmt system (I don't suppose anyone can guess how I found that out), when the need arose to use the admin_menu, FCKEditor and IMCE packages arose here, I wrote .spec files and turned the tarballs on the drupal.org site for the aforementioned modules into SRPMs and RPMs.

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Any best practices collected?

Hi folks,

it seems this group stalled a little bit, so lets try to give it some activity :-) I was wondering if this group has already collected some best practices around Drupal deployment and change management. So far, I have only found best practices for managing the source code of a drupal site, but I have not found anything how to transport configuration changes (done in the DB) from a devel environment to a production environment. As far as I can see there are no stable modules or scripts for that, at least not for D6. Any ideas where to look?

Regards,

Sebastian

14 comments
julma's picture

What is biggest drupal project you have ever managed ? (size in man-days)

Less than 50 man-days
30% (24 votes)
Between 50 man-days and 200 man-days
25% (20 votes)
Between 200 and 1000 man-days
30% (24 votes)
More than 1000 man-days
16% (13 votes)
Total votes: 81
1 comment

Drupal as a Sourceforge clone?

I'm investigating Drupal as an internal Sourceforge alternative. I'm having trouble understanding how the Project Manager works with issues and subversion repositories. Is there any GOOD documentation that explains how to the PM module/Drupal interact with repositories?

I'm familiar with Trac or GForge, where a project is directly tied to a specific repository and any commits you make against a specific issue are added to that ticket.

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Chris Charlton's picture

Post your proposed session for DrupalCampLA 2008

This is easy and quick, nothing fancy, no voting - just post your session idea (title) and your name/contact info and show up to present that day! We have sessions open from 10am-2pm each day (Saturday and Sunday) and each session should plan for 45 minutes each.

http://groups.drupal.org/node/12528 (edit wiki page)

If you can't see or edit the wiki page, be sure to join our group which may be required for editing the wiki page.

1 comment
Amazon's picture

Drupalcon Szeged hosting best practices: development, staging, deployment

If you are interested in participating in a panel on Drupal infrastructure, development environments, deployment, and best practices please indicate what you are interested in presenting. I am hoping to get some experts in best practices to do a tutorial.

Selenium and Drupal

First, for those that don't want to read the full post, here's the "30-second elevator speech":
This post to to discuss using Seleinum with Drupal. Specifically using Maven to run the selenium tests and writing the Selenium tests in Java.
The example code be downloaded from the Workhabit Inc. public repository here: https://svn.workhabit.com/svn/public/drupal/selenium/trunk
One must have the following installed to run:
1. Firefox
2. Java 1.5+
3. Maven
All 3 are easy to install and aquire. Once you download the code from the repository, you can just navigate to the directory and run:

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Amazon's picture

DEADLINE FRIDAY: Include Drupal 6.x in Open Solaris

If you are interested in seeing Drupal, and in particular a specific profile be included in OpenSolaris, Friday is the deadline for the next meeting.

Submit your comments here:

http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa;jsessionid=2A66929A74E346D56...

1 comment
liberatr's picture

Keeping Blocks in Synch

Hey folks,

I've worked on a number of Drupal sites where we needed to keep multiple sites in synch, and Drupal has been a challenge to keep that way because so many options are changed through the UI - this tends to show its weakness when we want to keep the settings across all sites (don't even mention content). Moving content types and views is easy with the import/export tools, but blocks are another story. The visibility rules, Roles, and input formats all require your time and attention to detail - time you could be spending working on other features.

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A Deployment Framework

I have been working on a framework that attempts to address some of the issues of deploying code and data in Drupal. It is outlined here:

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

I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this.

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Amazon's picture

Deployment and Change Management - The Problem

Written by Heyrocker.

I had been hoping to get together with people at Drupalcon this year to discuss issues surrounding deployment and change management. Unfortunately I will not be able to go. So this will have to act as my contribution to that discussion, which will hopefully carry on well beyond Boston. There are three parts - The Problem, Things That Help Now, and Some Ideas For The Future.

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Amazon's picture

Drupalcon Tutorial: Best practices in development environments, staging, build management, and production environments

Tutorial Panel, 90 minutes:

Presenters (Panelists)

  • Narayan Newton (OSUOSL)
  • Milind Parikh (IBM)
  • Sam Tresler (Advomatic)
  • Eric Mandel (BlackMesh)
  • Neil Giarratana (Lucidus Corporation)
    (Note that I have only included panelists who have been involved in the conversation for this presentation. There may be others interested or with whom I have not personally interacted with; this is not meant to be a slight...just giving the list as I knew it. NG)

Track

Site Building

Session Description

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Drupalcon Boston brainstorming session?

Is anyone interesting in having a brainstorming session on deployment and change/build management at Drupalcon Boston? This could either be an officially submitted proposal with an open agenda, or an unofficial get together in a side room at the conference center. It seems like a lot of us are struggling with enterprise-level deployment issues, and getting a bunch of smart and interested people in a room talking about their own solutions and brainstorming new ones would be useful for everyone. We all have our own ways of handling it and I'd love to hear other people's ideas.

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Senpai's picture

Can D7 handle enterprise-level change management features?

Now that Dries has concocted a business model that leverages core, I wonder if this is a good time to begin talking in earnest about making D7 into a manageable, upgradeable system with built-in change management features? Dries is one of only a few people with core commit privs in CVS, and as such, he's now perfectly positioned to listen and act on revisions to core that would make everyone's lives easier, but especially his new company's options or desires.

There's a need for small changes to Drupal that allow big business to leverage it to create and manage a system while being able to upgrade that system in a live setting.

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