An Enterprise Scale Drupal Workflow

Traditionally Drupal workflows have focused on publishing individual nodes on the production site. Larger non media organisations often want to manage a collection of small content changes as a single job. The content of a job needs to be reviewed by multiple stakeholders before being published. In addition to nodes or entities, it is likely that blocks and other elements may need to be deployed as part of a job. This needs to be handled in a coordinated way.

Dave Hall will give an overview of the implementation of an enterprise Drupal workflow that he designed and implemented with Technocrat for Insurance Australia Group (IAG). IAG is one of the 50 largest companies in Australia and the biggest insurance companies in Australasia. IAG migrated their Direct Insurance website from Autonomy Teamsite to Drupal. The project involved building a workflow management system that implemented accepted best practices in terms of content and configuration management, but extended it to support a job centric, enterprise friendly workflow.

The workflow management system allows non developers and developers alike to manage jobs from the initial request through to production with minimal effort. Per job developer sandboxes can be built on demand and destroyed as needed. The workflow system primarily uses features, drush, deploy, git, Jenkins and a little PHP glue to hold it all together. At any time users can see where a particular job is at and if the requirements are met, move it to the next step in the process.

The IAG workflow system allows dozens, even hundreds, of changes to be tracked and deployed to various environments every week.

Speaker(s): 
Track: 
DevOps
Experience level: 
Intermediate

Comments

I definitively would like to know the more technical aspects of this session!

Thanks for having a talk in Vienna!

Is there a way we could show off a demo of this? I'd really like to see it in operation. The ability to have a content workflow like this is a sort of holy grail for Drupal. I can't wait!

I am planning on this talk being more technical than my session at Business Days in Vienna. There are several ways I can present this session. Instead of pitching 4 different talks I proposed 1 session and will use the comments here a little to guide me in playing with the knobs and buttons to fine tune the mix of case study, demo, system overview and technical ins and outs.

I'd love to see this! I like creative implementations of Deploy and content workflows. I agree with Chris that it's the holy grail of Drupal and something we need more maturity in. The approach mentioned in this session seems like a step in the right direction!

Cool!

I've spoken to Dave about this solution and it sounds simply amazing. I can't wait to hear more about the technical implementation details!

Is this a coder session or site building session? It sounds somewhat closer to the latter from the description, unless there's lots of code that will be shown that's not mentioned here. :-)

It's neither! Sorry, ignore me. I got confused about which sessions I was looking at. :-)

This session addresses many pain points we have within our organisation. It would be highly valuable to hear how other businesses are managing to overcome what is a serious challenge in large scale Drupal sites.

Does that mean you are using deploy 7.x-2.x-dev in production?