Honestly I should have blogged this some time ago, but I have been unsure how involved I will be and I remain unsure how invloved I will be. Unfortunately I made a commitment to my other job (the one this site used to be about) before DrupalCamp was announced. I am really quite excited to be there as I love getting out to the LA meetups and I've never been to a Drupalcon, camp, or even a Barcamp before.
Currently I believe that I will be able to be there Sunday, and I hope to present on Drupal deployment solutions. I've been playing with DAST a lot lately, and frankly its amazing what the future holds for those wanting to do mass Drupal hosting. We are at a point where one click creation of databases, database users, core checkout from CVS, module checkout from CVS, translations, installation profiles, and the actual site installation is possible, and feasible with code publicly available from drupal.org. Very cool stuff.
We're almost to a point where a browser plugin could be developed so that a user could right-click on a link to a patch file and select 'Download and apply.' The plugin would download the patch, checkout a version of Drupal head that you configure, build new databases and users, apply the patch, do the site installation, (maybe download devel and use an install profile to enable it, and create the admin user, log the admin user in) and open up a new browser window with the fresh test site in it. All of this in say.....20-30 seconds. A dream you say? No, pretty much everything we need is here now. What's still comming is automatic unit testing of the patched site, without any user intervention. Agile development, here we come!
Anyway, I hope to be able to present some of this, and yes, I know, I am not signed up for a presentation as of yet. That is coming soon. If you have something else you would like to hear about on Sunday at DrupalCampLA, especially on this topic, and if you would like to help present this subject, please let me know. If not, I hope to see you there!
