Hundreds of new Drupal sites are launched every day. This demonstrates how easy it is to deploy Drupal, right? That's like saying 8.5 million people fly everyday, so flying a plane is easy. Downloading a zip file, extracting it, FTPing a bunch of code to a shared hosting server isn't deployment!

Code, content and configuration are meant to be the 3 pillars of a Drupal site. Code is handled by git, content is handled by deploy/features UUID and CMI solves configuration issues that Features and CTools missed. That's the theory, but in practice the 3 pillars are more like a tub of rainbow icecream. A view depends on a taxonomy term and the view output depends on an alter hook.

During this session Dave will rant a bit about his frustrations with deploying Drupal before he settles down and talks about challenges developers and site builders face when trying to build sites that are easily deployable. The session will also cover some of the mistakes made by module developers that make deployment more difficult than it should be.

About Dave

Dave Hall is the Managing Director of Dave Hall Consulting. When he isn't working with clients to build high quality web applications, he is helping them improve their infrastructure and business processes. In the last 5 years Dave has been responsible for building and launching over 2100 production Drupal sites and maintaining sites for companies including Pfizer, Insurance Australia Group, Al Jazeera and CNN. Let's just say he knows a thing or 2 about deployment.