An upgrade module proposal

http://groups.drupal.org/node/7423#comment-23147
Benjamin Melançon - Sat, 2007-12-15 11:55

Like everyone else using a lot of Drupal, I want sophisticated change management where we have:

1) a live site with users posting content like crazy and possibly administrators making some configuration changes, and
2) a development site where we add tons of functionality with all the code and configuration this implies, and presumably some site structure and pages related to the new functionality

And we can merge both of them together. A more sophisticated version of the poorly-named Journal module (which lets admins make log messages about configuration changes) could really help with this-- changes made by certain roles could be recorded by default, with a checkbox option whether to record in any case, and can then be played back on a test site to create a combined (nearly) live content + dev configuration site that's ready to be taken live.

In the meantime, though, there's some really basic stuff that all Drupal site admins need that we could do pretty easily I think, such as an upgrade module:

* record what modules are in use
* disable all non-core modules for you, and maybe disable itself on the way out ;-)
* you do your Drupal upgrade
* the first module you enable is the Upgrade module, which will re-enable the other modules (presumably in a couple stages that obey dependencies)

Interest? Input? There are probably ways to make this smarter by tying into update status module.

benjamin, Agaric Design Collective