I'm working on a large Drupal website under two environments -Development and Stage. While I work in Development, my client enters content in Stage.
My work in Development modifies the database. Then, I need to be really careful when taking my work to Stage -otherwise I could affect my client's content.
This is painful and inefficient. Do you know of other options for this particular scenario? Perhaps a database merging tool? Thank you for your advice.
This is an inherent issue with Drupal, the storing of configuration and content in the same database. There are methods to help mitigate the issue, (like the Features module that helps you compartmentalize configuration changes) but they are very dependent on module support.
On our last site we tried using the Features module and the Deployment module but so many of the modules we wanted to use didn't have support for Deployment that we ended up not going that route and just manually duplicate configuration changes by hand.
Depending on what your client is entering you might be able to use some handy mysql to solve the issue, can you tell us a bit more about your scenario?
There are two kinds of data, configuration and user content. For user content, set autoincrement to two and use even and odd for dev / staging. For configuration write update hooks. Easy.
Try looking at these two former thread on the same issue:
You could turn it around and keep copying your staging site's information to new instances of your development site's platform. Miguel Jacq has done a nice write up on achieving this set up. After testing things through you can then set up a thoroughly tested production platform at the production address and copy the staging site over.
Miguel's article: http://greenbeedigital.com.au/content/drupal-deployments-workflows-version-control-drushmake-and-aegir
Aegir: http://community.aegirproject.org
@jhuebsch: that sounds like a disturbing experience. Can you add a list of the afflicted modules and were you sure to use UUID & Strongarm?
