Managing the whole chain: Dev - Integration - Staging - Production is a major issue for Drupal. It's one of the Drupalcon2007 conclusion. As we discussed during the Building High Traffic and Scalable Businesses with Drupal , it is imperative for us to have migration methods and tools.
At France24, we are massively switching on Drupal. At the end of the year, france24.com website and several satelites will be using Drupal 5.2. We need a simple architecture to allow our team of 5 developers :
- to work on the same code repository and database.
- test the function on an integration environment
- publish content and edit configuration on a staging environment
- easily migrate on production or "synchronise" with a production environment.
Today, a majority of the Drupal dev i asked this question aswer me : "we are working directly on the production server, reporting manually the configurations we've made on a staging environment..."
At France24 we worked during 2 months to find a simple solution to answer this question. We have mounted a complete dev -> integration -> production environment responding to our needs. For some days, this platform is used by our team. It seems to work correctly, but we are still testing it. If you want to join the experiment and share, you are welcome.
Synthesis
So here's is our solution.