Versions of Drupal content

Question

Hello,

I'm working at a company that uses Drupal 6 to host documentation for it's SAAS products. The documentation is organized in various books using Book.module.

We have a Production Drupal site with the documentation for the production SAAS product.

Secondly, we have a "Preview" site, for the upcoming version of our product - the documentation is slightly different than on the Production site.

Thirdly, we have a "Development" site, which contains the unstable version of our product documentation. The documentation here changes frequently

Documents are originally authored on Development, moved to Preview, and then finally to Production.

It's quite unwieldy to manually update each Drupal site as our product evolves. I've looked at Deploy.module, and although it looks promising, it has limitations wrt books (ie: it can't handle the book structure/menus). It also makes for a solution that is quite complex with lots or moving parts.

I'm hoping that I've been over-thinking everything and some Drupal rockstar out there can point out an obvious (or not-so-obvious) solution.

(An obvious non-drupal solution would probably just be store the documentation pages as html in version control and update each site with the appropriate revision. But with this I lose the ACL functionality that Drupal is so good at.)

Thoughts? Cheers

Answer 1

I've had good luck with the Feeds module to get one site to consume a certain view from another site when I choose or periodically. It will take some configuration work to get going but it's more flexible than a turn-key solution and it's less fragile than any SQL dump -> import of the node revisions table.