This weekend I gave two talks at DrupalCamp Seattle. The first discussed some data import code I used at The Seattle Times while converting our old systems to Drupal. The second talk was a repeat of the deployment talk I gave at DrupalCamp Vancouver, with one new slide covering the just-released Database Scripts module.

I am honored and humbled to announce that I have accepted a position as Senior Programmer at Palantir. My first day will be June 30. It is an amazing opportunity for me to dive deeper into Drupal and get more involved with the community while working with an immensely talented group of people. I'm staying in Seattle, however I will return home to Chicago periodically to satiate my homesickness and engage in nerf wars with my new colleagues.

The first beta of the Deployment module has been released as of last night! This beta is a big step forward from the alpha code I've had available for a couple months. The improvements include:

• Many UI improvements
• Vastly superior error handling and reporting
• Postgres support
• Detailed auditing of past deployments
• Can now add multiple views/content types to a plan in one shot
• General code cleanup and bug-fixing

This weekend I went to DrupalCamp Vancouver and gave a talk on staging and deployment solutions in Drupal. It went really well and the audience was engaged and enthusiastic. Everyone came up with great questions and observations, and we threw around a lot of ideas. I really enjoyed myself and I'd like to extend my thanks to Ariane, Dale, Dave, Boris, and all the others who helped to organize this event.

DrupalCamp Vancouver is coming up this weekend, and it should be a great time! Camp begins Friday morning and ends Saturday evening. I will be speaking Saturday afternoon at 3:15 on staging and deployment strategies. If all goes well, I just might have my first real beta of my deployment module ready by the time I hit the stage. It is getting very close. I will definitely be giving a demo of its operation either way. If you're going to be there, please stop by and say hello. If you don't have plans to attend yet, well, its too late. The event is sold out.

A few weeks ago we launched the new redesign of NWsource.com. It was a big launch, with a whole pile of new content types, blocks and views. One of the things we did with this launch was turn on CSS aggregation. We have over a dozen individual CSS files being imported, so getting them shoved into one HTTP request was a big win.

I am very sad not to be at Drupalcon this week, but I am pleased to announce that I am now the proud owner of a shiny new Drupal project simply called Deployment. You can visit and download the current code at drupal.org. Please heed the note about the module's current state. I am eager to get testing started and hear people's comments, however the modules are not production-ready at this time.

A couple days after I posted my last article, I went to del.icio.us to see if anyone had bookmarked it. A user named timbaileylondon had, with this note - "We need to get on top of this. The last one in particular made me cringe." Too true on both counts.

Having defined the problem in my last post, we can now look at some of the options currently available for dealing with it. None of them is a complete answer, but they can all help out with some of the pieces. As a reminder, I'm just concerned with the problem of deploying changes to live sites for the moment. This is not a complete list by any means, but it is some stuff that I've found useful. Have you got another tactic you use to manage these types of changes?

I had been hoping to get together with people at Drupalcon this year to discuss issues surrounding deployment and change management. Unfortunately I will not be able to go. So this will have to act as my contribution to that discussion, which will hopefully carry on well beyond Boston. There are three parts - The Problem, Things That Help Now, and Some Ideas For The Future.