Overview of Development to Live Deployment Strategies

General

• PDF of an old but excellent Jeff Eaton presentation
• A surprisingly informative deployment discussion on Stack Overflow, but best comment is Jeff Eaton's mostly reprising his session above.
• Fairly balanced 2008 overview of deployment options by Greg Dunlap (author of Deploy module).

Plain Everything-in-code

• Straightforward overview and plain everything-in-code approach.
• Drupal staging and deployment tips from the awesome Sacha Chua.

Features module

http://drupal.org/project/features
http://developmentseed.org/tags/features
http://developmentseed.org/sectors/scaling-deployment

http://www.sthlmconnection.se/tips-and-tweaks/drupalcamp-sthlm-workshop-ii-features
http://www.sthlmconnection.se/tips-and-tweaks/drupalcamp-sthlm-workshop-i-context

Drush Make and Features module

http://www.scribd.com/doc/22671613/Automating-Drupal-Deployment-with-Drush-Make-and-Features

Deploy module

Deploy module is fantastic, and quite stable for a module that only has a dev release. Greg Dunlap wrote Deploy for the publishing industry-- originally for a major newspaper, and then for a major magazine.

http://www.palantir.net/blog/bringing-deployment-capability-drupal

http://www.lullabot.com/drupal-voices/drupal-voices-09-greg-dunlap-deploy-module

Used on:
http://www.lullabot.com/drupal-voices/drupal-voices-76-george-demet-talks-about-foreign-affairs-drupal

Patterns

Great, but problem that they don't export as features do-- but you can put a pattern in a feature if you want.

http://groups.drupal.org/patterns

Creating or writing Patterns
http://drupal.org/node/408940

Aegir

Aegir is more geared toward mass deployment, but its contributions to Drush have been fantastic.

http://groups.drupal.org/aegir-hosting-system/documentation

Agaric's own deployment processes

http://data.agaric.com/node/322

Key feature includes easily bringing the live database back to development and testing sites (via version control), where these various methods of putting configuration changes in code can be followed.

Other/Related

http://andyleonard.com/2009/12/09/drupal-deployment-sysadmin-best-practices/

http://www.metaltoad.com/blog/drupal-deployment-checklist

Nothing in any of the above listings is necessarily mutually exclusive!

On Features, see also:
http://code.developmentseed.org/featureserver
http://drupal.org/project/kit