Serving Drupal versus Development

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cjobes's picture

Greeting everyone,
My name is Cy Jobes and I work for Local Government Federal Credit Union in Raleigh, NC. (www.lgfcu.org)

We are looking to use Drupal in our next design of our website. In doing so we will be using more of what seems to be an enterprise level of things. I say “enterprise” because every person I ask about our method of development and live servers, and how we need to have them setup, tells me I need someone with enterprise experience.

Below I am going to describe for you what it is we intend to do, which is how we do it now without Drupal. I am hoping someone can enlighten me to a solution. Otherwise my boss is going to drop the entire notion of Drupal and I’ll have to build the CMS myself. Please help protect my sanity. :D

We have a design team that also knows HTML and CSS to create the websites. I do all the coding - Javascript, AJAX, PHP and anything like that. I have 12 years of PHP experience, so I understand the coding world quite a bit. Once the pages are designed I cut things up for reuse, and create everything else so that pages are built with the proper includes and so on.

The plan to Drupal is similar in that we intend to use our code, not Drupal’s. I will re-write .tpl files as needed and create modules as needed. I know there is a lot to this process in and of itself, but that is not what this conversation is about.

Presently, we save all assets to a versioning system. I have a PHP app that talks with this system and allows people with very little knowledge about moving files to do so without using FTP and/or any other method that they could accidentally mess things up with. This application is key because it allows us to only move to the live server the files we want, and there is never any human communication with the live server, keeping it from being royally screwed up as well.

Our intention with Drupal is to do the same. Our IT/Security department is also adamant that in no way is there to be any capability that a person can login to the Drupal system on the live site. We will use our servers only. Not Acquia servers or anything like them. We must host the site on our own servers, and the ONLY human interaction on the live site would be with forms that the site provides to our visitors. Nothing else.

Therein lies our dilemma. How do we set up the system to move only the items we want to be live to the live server? Keep in mind that we may have several different pages being worked on, or created, at any given time. This means we need to make sure that only the things we want to be live will be made live. This is including the additional assets such as images, documents and scripts.

If you have the answers I need, or know of a contact for this answer, respond soon.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Cy (919-755-0534) Ext. 3188

Comments

Confused

DavidMinton's picture

Are you suggesting a solution in which you would not login to Drupal on your production server for configuration or content entry? Would you be making these changes on a staging server, and replicating to the production server?


David Minton, Managing Partner, DesignHammer | Durham, NC, USA

Other than the setup of

cjobes's picture

Other than the setup of Drupal by the Superadmin, no other users would be created to give access to the live server.

So far I have found that Drush might do what we need, but I am uncertain of all it is capable of.

An article I have found suggests that I can use RSYNC and RSYNCD from Drush to update the server.
http://www.covenantdesign.com/blog/development-staging-production-proble...

This is how we update our site now. We RSYNC from a staging server that is identical to the live server.

My understanding of RSYNC in UNIX world is that I can exclude certain things from being overwritten. On the Drush site I looked at the API and saw that exclusions can be made for its RSYNC, but do not understand how this is done for the database portion.

In a nutshell, we could leave things unpublished that we did not want to go live, and have those we want live to be marked as published. RSYNC/RSYNCD would move the files and DB data, but it would need to be setup so that configuration files and configuration DB tables were excluded.

Having said all that, I'm just guessing that is how it works or is possible based on my limited knowledge. I need confirmation and guidance with this. We are prepared to pay for any consultancy if needed, as long as we know the person providing it does indeed understand our needs and knows what they are talking about. Boss made me say that. :D

Cy

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