Jeff presents Joomla! I present Drupal! The two web site frameworks go head to head at our next meetup this evening.

More info and RSVP form.

If you’re going to be in the downtown Providence, RI area tomorrow, Thursday Sept. 13, please join us for the monthly Web Developer Lunch Hour meetup.

This time, my coworker Chris will demo Ruby on Rails.

Please RSVP [meetup.com].

Check out the beta of the new RI Nexus site, full of news and resources about information techonology and digital media in Rhode Island.

I wrote some new Drupal modules to support it. Feedback and suggestions are welcome!

Thanks to Noosphere Networks, I’m releasing a script that helps developers of web sites built with Drupal to maintain separate development/test and production sites, pushing changes from test to production as needed. This is challenging with a stock Drupal installation. Changes to PHP code are no problem, because it lives in the filesystem and can be copied or committed to a revision-control system like Subversion. But a lot of Drupal’s configuration work take place within its web administration interface and is saved to the database, where production content such as user accounts and comments is also stored.

The desire to do this frequently comes up on Drupal’s forums, and the typical workarounds have some large drawbacks (involving some combination of extended downtime on the production site, duplication of work, and the loss of content, comments, and user account changes made in the interim).

This small script attempts to solve that by categorizing Drupal’s tables and moving only the right ones at the right time, while handling details such as merging sequence numbers. It also dumps Drupal’s databases to disk in a format that works well for checkin to a revision control system.

This is free software, licensed under the GPL.

There’s a more ambitious project called AutoPilot that aims to do this and more in the future, but its ability to merge test sites into production without losing production content isn’t available yet, and I needed something now.

Be warned, though, that this is an alpha release, intended for those with familiarity with MySQL and Drupal’s table layout. If you have CCK fields, there may be some manual work required when you modify your field layout because CCK tends to change your database schema, and Migraine does not currently attempt to automate all of those changes. It will detect them and warn of the problem, however.

See more information at the Migraine project page.

I’m holding the next PHP meetup for the RI area tomorrow evening (Tuesday) at Trinity Brewhouse in downtown Providence.

If you’d like to join us for free-form discussion of web development, PHP, and various types of beer, please RSVP.