Syncing Drupal site between dev, staging and production

Question

Often after a Drupal (6.x) site is launched, I have people starting to sign up and enter their own content. Whenever there is need for an upgrade, the database on production is copied to dev and then the development is done on dev, later get pushed to staging for client's approval.

When the site is eventually ready to go live, there is a problem. Production server has the latest user inputted content, dev and staging have the latest functionality. Simply overwriting the database on production won't work. What I usually do is to write down what has been done to dev and than follow the steps to go though the implementations again on production. As the system grows bigger, one single mistake on production may cause lost of business. I can't shutdown the site for several hours. I can't tell how many people are using the site at a given time, even so it's impossible to wait for a time where nobody is on the site to make the upgrade.

Has anyone have any good idea?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are two concepts you need to look into: The first is "Exportables" which is generally a way of exporting all the configuration of a given module. The second is "Features" (terribly named, yes) which is a way of grouping a set of Exportables into a given changeset for version control, updating, deployment, rollback, etc.

For clarification, many modules implement their own "Exportables" methodology what I linked to above was the Exportables module. Here's a wider strategy for it - http://www.sthlmconnection.se/tips-and-tweaks/exportable-configuration-your-drupal-module-ctools