A Vancouver Joomla User Group started up recently. We’re experimenting with what format will serve us well. For this month’s meeting, I’ll give a talk about staging servers (details below) and we’ll have plenty of time for networking and Q&A. I there there’s lots of room for more Joomla content in this town. Here‘s the coordinates:

Going live: adding a staging server to your Joomla development process

Thursday, 8. October 2009, 18:30-20:30hAt The Network Hub, 422 Richards Street, 3rd floor, Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z3. tel +1 604 767 8778.

A monthly meeting of the Vancouver Joomla User Group. Admission free. All people interested in learning more about the Joomla! content management system, and helping others learn more, are welcome.

Agenda

  • Introductions.
  • Featured topic: Going live: adding a staging server to your Joomla development process, by Jim DeLaHunt.
  • Q&A.
  • Door prize drawing.
  • Networking.

Our featured topic:

It’s possible to add components, move around modules, and improve your Joomla! site while it’s running live. But this is a risky way to do it. Good development process calls for setting up a “staging” or “development” server, shielded from the public, where developers can experiment and fix bugs. When the new features are ready, you push them to the live server. That’s a pretty theory. But what happens in practice?

Jim DeLaHunt will talk about the reliability and availability goals for a Joomla! development process. He will show how using separate development and localhost servers can help achieve these goals. He will share his favourite Joomla! component for pushing content live from the dev server. He will sketch a workstation setup which allows interactive debugging of the PHP code for Joomla! components and core code. He will analyse the contents of a Joomla! database, and which parts should not be copied from a dev server. He will highlight some of the difficult issues which come with trying to do a push from a development server to a live server.

There will be plenty of time for a Q&A.

There should be a healthy turnout tonight, considering how new the group is.  I hope to see folks support this group over time.

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