Staging and deployment is a vital part of any project, Drupal or not. As I’ve discussed previously, staging and deploying to production is particularly difficult for all the Content Management Systems out there that intermingle content and configuration settings within the database - and Drupal is definitely one of them.

Greg Dunlap and I wish to hold a session about this, and have proposed a Staging and Deployment Panel Session for Drupalcon 2009 in Washington DC. Greg has authored the Deploy module, while I have created the Database Scripts module. We also encourage anyone else who has a good staging and deployment set up to join us on this panel.

I hope to foster continued discussion about this issue, possible solutions, and possible advancements to Drupal core to ease version control and merging with production data.

I will definitely be attending DrupalCon DC as part of the Agaric Design Collective team. I’ll be around, and would love to sit and talk with anyone about anything and everything web development (I’m a big talker…). You can contact me or follow me to see where I’ll be around.

I am also around for Drupal meet ups in the MA and RI areas. I attended the Drupal meet up in Natick, MA last Thursday and had a great discussion on how to possibly upgrade DBScripts for Drupal 6, or solve the problem in another fashion. If you’re in the Providence area, join the Rhode Island Drupal Group and let us know your availability to meet up and talk more!