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

Thought?

This blog post is a cross post of this g.d.o post, please discuss there.