NYCPHP Meetup

[Mitch Pirtle]

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 10:32 AM, Tom Flis <webhomebase at comcast.net> wrote:
> I'm faced with a similar situation, but instead of starting with a Joomla
> site I have the task of taking an existing commercial CMS-based site and
> migrating it to Joomla. I want to be able to use a team approach to
> systematically develop and move selected parts of the site to a shared
> development environment (probably on a different web host). That is, one
> site used by the Team instead of multiple localhost installs. How would one
> setup the 3 multiple servers in this case? Any suggestions / tips would be
> welcome. Don't know if this will trigger a lengthy blog post from Mitch.

Ok, that does it.

*spacemonkey whips out text editor, starts typing

:-)

Seriously though, I was on a distributed team at Viacom and had
several servers that were basically forcing your code to run the
gauntlet - I developed locally, pushed via svn to a repository, and
that was manually pushed to a shared development server where all
database changes were exported via mysqldump (one file for data, one
file for schema). Releases were tagged, and tagged releases were then
pulled to a test server, and once the codebase made it past test, that
release was tagged again and a tarball was submitted to their internal
platform publishing system for distribution to the live site.

A major hassle was dealing with all the database changes while active
development was going on - someone was invariably changing menu items
while someone else was moving modules around, while someone else was
installing a plugin and assorted components and modules for something.
In the end, all Joomla admin activity was done on the development
server, and pushed back to the local development installs via
mysqldump.

Pretty much did the same for the Jetsetter site for Gilt. That was a
much smaller team, and included some exotic tech so there was
additional complexity.

Before that I was involved with a project that had a pretty sweet
distribution tool made with phing, allowing you to say "phing install
$storename" and the following happened:

* svn export of stable tagged Joomla platform
* svn export of stable tagged commerce extensions suite
* svn export of $store data, media and static markup
* tar all this up and fling via scp to production or test servers,
which would automatically untar and install

That was awesome, but yeah code was tracked in what felt like was a
bazillion places as a result...

-- Mitch