The lack of a robust content staging solution in Drupal has been long standing. In this post I won't go into details of why this is such a difficult problem to solve. Instead, I'll suggest a plan, to make a plan, to solve it! So, those of you that are interested in tackling a strategically important functionality for Drupal 8, please continue to read.
What's being done right now?
Throughout the last 8-9 months I've been working on a rewritten version of UUID and Deploy for Drupal 7. It's been moving slow for different reasons, one being because we're very few people coding on it. But (dare I say it?) we are close to a release of Deploy!
Acquia started an initiative called Large Scale Drupal (LSD), focusing on identifying, planning and consolidating work on problems for large scale Drupal implementations. Content staging is one focus area, with wireframes and workflow discussions.
In parallel with all this, the Configuration Management Initiative landed the first UUID patch and the initial version of the file based configuration API. Both patches are important for improving the content staging situation in Drupal 8, but it's not enough.
A plan, to make a plan
For those of you that are interested to work on this topic, here are some events you should participate in during DrupalCon Denver, and some points we need to discuss in order to get out of Denver with a solid plan on how to make content staging work better in Drupal 8!
Core conversation: Content Staging in Core, Tue 11:15am - 11:45am
Some points I will raise and we hopefully will discuss during my core conversation:
- Why a file based configuration API isn't the whole answer
- What I think is needed in core to tackle content staging better (this will also be a separate post soon)
- Next steps for the UUID implementation in core
- Do we need some sort of documentation, group or sub-initiative to track this?
BoF: Content Staging in Drupal 7, Wed 11:45am - 1:00pm
- Work being done in different projects for Drupal 7, like Deploy, State Machine, LSD etc.
- How to consolidate work across those projects
- Next steps moving towards a working solution in Drupal 7
BoF: Content Staging in Drupal 8, Wed 1:00pm - 2:00pm
- Follow up on our discussion from the core conversation
- Create issues, documentation or plans we find needed in order to move forward
Comments
Hurray! I'm excited to help
Hurray! I'm excited to help out where I can. At minimum, I pledge to review patches and advocate for them in the queue.
UX-Team will help on reviews/design
Same for the UX-team, we would love to see support for this in core and where needed actual UI changes. Feel free to approach us anytime.
I'll be there for sure.
I'll be there for sure.
Neil Hastings
http://twitter.com/indytechcook
That's great news. I've had
That's great news. I've had this issue at a couple large corporate locations.
I'll be there for sure.
Meet up at DrupalCon?
We should definitely meet up at DrupalCon. I'm planning on coming to a couple of your talks and a BoF or two. I'll coordinate with the folks on the LSD end of things to be sure we're able to get some people in the room with you and talk things over.
EDIT: Thanks for getting this started!
Great to hear that we have
Great to hear that we have some momentum here. I'm really excited to talk to everyone that's interested in this issue, in Denver.
I'm sure great things will happen.
Post details. I wish I could
Post details. I wish I could attend!
Many Thanks,
Alice Carback
follow up
Hey Dick,
Did you document the follow up to our discussion at Drupalcon somewhere?
Neil Hastings
http://twitter.com/indytechcook
Posted some notes
Neil (and everyone else of course),
I've posted notes, links and some thoughts here: http://senzilla.com/drupal/drupalcon-content-staging-and-drupal-8
I'm in the process of gathering issues and summarizing discussions to create a meta issue in the core queue where we can keep track of work being done. I'll keep everyone updated here.
Thanks Dick. I'm excited
Thanks Dick. I'm excited about the potential here!
Neil Hastings
http://twitter.com/indytechcook
Lots of progress to report.
Lots of progress to report. We now have UUIDs on all entities in core, we picked JSON-LD as serialization format and started digging into content staging details, and sponsorship for an entity property API before Drupalcon. maybe dixon will host a BOF in Munich so we can plan for rest of year.