Hi folks!
I really like drupal somehow. But what disturbs me most is that i can't figure out a clear way of deployment. Drupal stores a lot of stuff inside the database (views, cck, workflow, trigger etc) that needs to be updated.
I've seen some modules that could be used for this task (eg features) and I'm not sure if they are sufficient. Yet they are only for drupal6 and i currently have to work on a drupal5 site where updating is not yet an option.
Any ideas?
This is a weakness. Drupal doesn't have the developer tools built in that make development and deployment easy like Rails does (for example). One problem is Drupal isn't aware of it's environment natively. Secondly, there are too many different methods and modules that require special care. It can get very confusing. But things are getting better with drush and drush make.
I'm assuming here that you have a development environment on your local machine and a live or staging server you upload to.
The first thing you have to do is work out how to get your database fixture and your code to and from your server to your development environment very quickly. You need to make this proceedure as painless as possible so you can keep different versions of your site in sync without much effort. This will mean you will hopefully be able to manage less change every time you deploy. Hopefully...
Moving the database around isn't too hard. You could use phpMyadmin or mysqldump but the backup migrate module is my favorite tool.
To upload code from your local repository or site can be done in a few ways. If you use a version control system like git, you can commit on your local machine and check out again on the staging server. There are also special deployment tools like capistrano you should take a look at. (if you know this stuff already it may benefit others to read). If you're using FTP you should probably try something different.
If you're working with a site that is still in production, you can afford to make small incremental changes to your local site, then repeat on the live site and down load the new version of the database when your changes are in place. This does mean you double handle the database but can be a safe way of doing things. It keeps both your database closer to each other and minimises risk.
You can also export views backup to your server in either your code or importing them into your live site. There is a hack to get around deploying cck changes here: http://www.tinpixel.com/node/53 it works OK but cannot truly manage changes like rollbacks. (Respect to the guy who wrote that)
You can also use hook_updateN to capture changes and then run update.php to apply them. I worked on a d5 site with dozens of developers and this was the only way to keep things moving forward. This may be a good option if your site is live or if you need all database schema changes captured in a version control system (so you can roll back).
Also: Take a look at drush and drush make. These tools can be of great benefit. I can't remember how much support is for d5.
One final method of dealing with this is not to use cck or views (and use hook updates). But this is really only suitable for enterprise sites where you have big developer resources. This may seem like a strange suggestion but it can negate this whole problem completely.
Sorry I could not give you a clear answer. This is because one does not exist yet. You'll end up finding your own rhythm once you get into. Just keep backups of your database if you can roll back to them easy enough.