Drupal Planet

Long time Drupal contributor Kevin Walsh died on Tues July 19th, 2022 after being struck by a hit-and-run driver.

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Sometimes you want a View that follows the internal logic of the filters you set up on the View, but also can have some items hand selected or cultivated to the top of the View. Or perhaps the other way to describe it is a Nodequeue View that is backfilled with some other View based logic  so that you end up with a full display regardless of how many items are actually in the Nodequeue.

Using the Drupal module Hook Update Deploy Tools to move node content  can be an important part to a deployment strategy. 

With the 7.x-1.18 release of Hook Update Deploy Tools for Drupal 7 it is now possible to export a node on a development sandbox, commit the export file to the repository, then import it using either a hook_update_N() or using drush site-deploy-import node

Pros:

Other than a quick sample of blocking a specific file extension using the 'nomask' option, the documenttation for Drupal's file_scan_directory() does not help much with how to bock content from certain directories.  The documentation says

Drupal Hook Update Deploy Tools now (as of v 7.x-1.16) has the ability to enable or disable  a View from within a hook_update_N().  It handles validation to make sure that your request to enable or disable a View actually did what you asked it to do.

Add something like this to a hook_update_N in your custom deploy module.install
to enable some Views.

The Hook Update Deploy Tools module  can now programatically import a list of redirects in a hook_update_N().  The redirect list comes from a csv text file that lists old-path, new-path on each line.  Running the import in an update hook is as simple as something like this:

Page Manager pages in Drupal 7 are an odd mixture of configuration and content. They can be Featurized, but then if someone edits the content on the live site, the next time the Feature gets reverted, the content changes get blown away. So in many cases the deployment of Page Manager Pages consists of exporting them by hand, then importing them by hand. Until NOW.

This presentation was given at the 2016 Florida Drupalcamp in Orlando on 5/05/2016. It covers my experience and recommendations for how to do continuous integration or continuous deployment with Drupal 7 websites and the role played by hook_update_N() to orchestrate code and configuration changes with releases.

Thanks to the writing and efforts of Dcycle, Befused and others, there is a lot of good information out there on why and how to use a custom deploy module in Drupal 7 to manage the deployments of code and settings on your websites.  They describe them pretty clearly and make it a simple process to copy and paste  bits of code to assemble your own custom deploy module.  What could be wasier than that?