Editing Drupal Hospex Features (section)

== Release Management ==

(written from a BW-Rox perspective - please adapt)

Right now release management in BW is based on SVN. Most changes live in the code, so it's easy to track things via SVN, and a release is mostly code.

DB changes are done via dbupdate.php - which is not the nicest way to do it, but it keeps things more or less transparent by only looking at SVN.

=== Problem: How to deploy configuration changes? ===

Drupal works quite differently, as a lot of things happen in the DB, and will thus not show up on SVN. Releasing a new version will mean both changes to the code (CSS files, theme templates, modules), and changes in the DB via the admin backend. This makes things a bit more difficult and less transparent for developers who want to keep track of things via SVN.

And quite often you get heavy dependencies of DB and code - for instance, if template files refer to content type names that only exist in the DB.

=== Solution: Custom modules instead of admin configuration ===

It is possible to define a lot of stuff in Drupal in the code, instead of the DB, via custom modules. I would very much vote for this option. It requires some Drupal expertise, though.