DrupalCon Copenhagen 2010 Roundup

The great thing about a DrupalCon is that it provides the perfect opportunity to learn how others are working with Drupal and to get to share some of our own experiences.

We‘ve all got our own methods, tricks and preferences for bringing a Drupal site into life but the process of effectively managing the development, staging, production and maintenance workflow is a real challenge.

It is exactly this topic that I had wanted to learn more about when heading to DrupalCon Paris. Sadly workload prevented us making that conference and then volcanoes did the same for DrupalCon San Francisco. So, after a little more than a year of working on our own workflow methods through a bit of research mixed with trial and error, it was great to attend Copenhagen where new services and maturing software were presented that really start to help nail some key workflow issues.

Two sessions in particular helped clear some of the fog in my own mind on how best we should be working and what our processes should be moving towards.

For every site, a make file

Jeff Miccolis gave a presentation on the approach of using .make files. No doubt like many others, we have been using SVN to manage all the files that make up a Drupal installation. You might also be repeat using configurations with installation profiles and features. Well, the .make file is great news.

Simply put, the .make file allows you to declare everything about an installation including core version, modules required and their versions and the details of any patches that should be applied. You can then use the .make file with Drush to automatically assemble all the pieces for installation. Amongst a heap of other advantages, it means your version control repository only need contain the .make file and the customised elements such as custom features, modules and themes.

The session didn‘t go into any real depth on how to use this in a production environment but gave enough introduction to make experimenting with this whole new approach exciting and a much improved way of doing things.

Aegir - One Drupal to rule them all

Adrian Rossouw and Antoine Beaupré

I‘ve been hearing for some time now how Aegir is great for helping you look after the deployment and ongoing maintenance of Drupal installations. In fact, I‘ve been sold on it for some time, despite not having yet tried it. Recent changes and improvements to our own hosting environment and workflow meant this was a priority session for me and I was simply blown away.

What Aegir does is provide you with a control panel to manage your Drupal deployments and with it you can rapidly setup, install and upgrade installations across servers. We were also shown how distributions such as Open Atrium can be available to easily and instantly be installed, something that is incredibly powerful.

All in all, it was a brilliant conference for me. I got to meet some of the folks involved in the drupal.org redesign work, as well as having the chance to work together during Friday‘s code sprint. The conference has given me real insight into the areas where we have been getting things right and importantly, into areas where we can improve on how we do things.