uuid

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.

I've written a module that maintains relationships between a node and all of its "reference fields" across multiple Drupal instances, based upon the UUID of the referenced entities. The "Node export relation" module didn't quite cut it for me (even after modifying it), and I never found anything else that seemed to fit the bill.

I'd like to share this via a Drupal project, but first wanted to check if the module is actually useful, and whether it doesn't overlap with another one (didn't really find one that truly covers the same topic).

Here is a short summary of what we discussed at the Drupalcon London.

There has been a core conversation talk by Peter Wolanin and me, of which you can find the video here and the slides here.

Roadmap

The further roadmap is to:

• define the API + do a test entity type
• port a core entity
• do performance testing
• implement revisions + port node and other entity types
• refactor field storage

Performance testing basically should be repeated after every step.

Status

• There is a first patch that moves the entity API in its own module, which we need to get in first.
  http://drupal.org/node/1018602 -> Needs review.
• There is an issue for implementing basic CRUD and porting a first entity type: comment
  http://drupal.org/node/1184944 - work in progress
• We've worked on defining the basics of the API at the Drupalcon codesprint (see below).

One of the key aspects of solving the configuration management conundrum is identifying how to uniquely identify data between servers. To this end I propose implementing UUIDs in core for the identification of content, and to provide an API through which UUIDs can be generated and added use by contrib modules. While we are still talking through many big picture architectural issues, I think that it is possible to get moving on this and several other tasks to get the real work started. So here is my proposed game plan for this, created after some discussion with Dave Hall (skwashd) who has put a lot of work recently into porting the UUID module to D7.