I'm using Dominique De Cooman's term, "the Drupal Staging Problem," to refer to the trouble that most large Drupal sites have. When a team collaborates on a site, and when a site has both a staging and live copy, it's a battle to keep data and files up-to-date across the different servers.

There are a number of partial solutions to this problem. Or at least, attempts to solve it. The original solution, still popular, is to simply copy an entire database from a live server down to development and staging servers. More recently, there a whole array of modules that address at least one aspect of the problem: backup_migrate, features, deploy, ...

This presentation focuses on one of these recent modules, site_update. This little-known module may be just the thing to solve this problem on your next Drupal site! I'll give a brief explanation of the problem, how site_update attempts to solve it, and give a live demo and Q and A.

Here's some additional reading, to help you decide whether this presentation is worth attending:

- http://old.dave-cohen.com/node/3932
- http://dominiquedecooman.com/blog/drupal-staging-problem

Audio available here:
http://www.archive.org/details/TheDrupalStagingProblem