Development/Live environments

Hi all,

we are creating a financial web application using Drupal as base.

Our codebase (custom modules, classes, supporting files) as well as themes, Drupal modules that we use, and the misc directory are under SVN.

We have a testing and a live server. Our team members check out the SVN to their local machines and developer there, then the QA is done on the test server. This works fine for module development.

However, when we add new pages, or have to change the blocks configuration, we need to do it on the testing server, and when we go live, we have to recreate it on the live server. This obviously is not a good release process since it has many opportunities for human fuckups (excuse the technical term).

Note that we can't synch databases easily; the live servers is authorative for transactions and content (nodes are created programatically etc). The testing server will always run behind the live server. Even if we chose to synch live and test DBs, we could not afford the downtime introduced by uploading the test DB to the live server for a go live.

I have not found any good best practices that we could follow; the Auto Pilot project, which seems to be in our direction, seems abandoned.

I wonder what other larger web sites with multiple developers do?

Any input or pointers appreciated.

-Tobias