Can you help me to understand, how do I do Drupal website deployment and development?
Suppose, I developed 1.0 version of Berty&Frank website. I copied everything to their production server and it is alive and kicking now. Site is already full of contents and is growing.
I am asked to add additional features to the website. I am now experimenting with the way how I can implement them in a dev version. I am creating/deleting content types, fill created nodes with demo data just to see how they look like etc. Now I found the way and I want to upgrade production website to the same structure as my dev version now. How do I do that?
Is the only way to manually make every change I made in dev version?
I would explore the Aegir project for the future management of your website. It allows you to clone a site, then to upgrade the site to a new “platform” which could be the next release of Drupal or another Drupal system (such as OpenAtrium).
More can be found at the aegir wiki.