Tomorrow Drupal4Gov is holding their monthly meeting, bringing together developers and IT managers who work in the federal space to talk about Drupal best practices specifically in the U.S. government space. This is a new group, led by Kirsten Burgard at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and one that has already generated a lot of interest and participation. Jeff is headlining this month’s meeting and will present via webcast on managing a clean development -> staging -> production workflow in Drupal. His discussion will be targeted to IT decision makers and to developers who are interested in streamlining their site development and deployment with the Features module.
There are some large issues and headaches that come from following the traditional approach of keeping configuration in the database, and these get exasperated when working on complex sites that require a solid development and staging system. What happens when your production database gets out of sync with the configurations changes that just passed QA on the staging site? Do you really have to go in by hand and reconfigure the changes again on the live database?
This is where the Features module comes to the rescue. Jeff will explain how Features let you export your code, check it into version control, and then just push it out to the production site, saving you valuable time, reducing the possibility of errors, and drastically improving your Drupal experience. Jeff will also talk about the benefits of using Features when building a site, give some examples of how exporting our code to Features has helped us build faster at Development Seed, and prepare developers to start making their own Features.
The presentation is at 3:00 pm tomorrow (Tuesday, March 16). If you’d like to join, contact Kirsten Burgard at Veterans Affairs to get access to the webcast.