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.
A few weeks ago I was trying to chase down a bug in content copy, because it was causing us problems with some content types we were trying to move. I had never dealt with FAPI much before, and it was a real eye-opener discovering I could script content type exports and imports easily in a few lines of code, and then further realizing I could actually script any form the same way. I started thinking about how many Drupal objects can be scripted quickly this way - node load/save, user load/save, any form, etc. It was then that I started thinking that maybe all we need to tackle the deployment problem is a) a way to abstract each of these pieces of data and b) a way to move them from server to server. Maybe Drupal doesn't need an overarching deployment solution, it just needs some glue.
