One of my projects early this summer is to streamline the site update process. It takes about 45 minutes to run a full site update now from launch to completion, but there's a lot of redundant work done and redundant data stored that was introduced when we added the three levels of highway systems: active, preview, and devel.
Before I get too far into this, I'd like to make sure we're happy with these three levels, and with the way systems in each level are treated. Is there any further refinement of the levels that would be useful?
As a reminder, here's how the levels work now:
active: completed systems, no datacheck errors, any change that would affect users with entries in their list files will be reported in the updates log, by default these are the only systems shown in maps and stats
preview: completed systems still in final review, should have no datacheck errors before being promoted to this status, changes can be made that would affect users with entries in their list files with no updates log entry, shown in maps and stats only when specifically requested
devel: systems in development, either still incomplete, with datacheck errors, or with questions about whether the system belongs in the project at all, never included in maps and stats (other than the highway browser)
Currently, one chooses whether to include preview systems in maps and stats when viewing pages on the site by specifying a query string parameter to select a database. My plan is to consolidate back into a single database, so new query string parameters will be used to determine whether preview systems are to be included. This will require some hopefully straightforward changes to PHP code behind many of the web pages.
Any thoughts, requests, suggestions related to this?
