Build Systems & Change Management

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.