For a task as important as building a full-featured community-driven website, it is necessary that you spend a lot of time considering your options, and developing and testing your site. Since it is not really feasible to do this sort of work on the live site, you need to employ a development machine to aid you. Because of this, the topic of deployment is an important one in the overall scheme of things because it is deployment that actually links your finished development to the live site.

This chapter outlined a solid process for preparing for deployment. It was also necessary to set up a new database on the host site, but this proved to be relatively easy because any good host makes the task fairly simple by providing a tool like phpMyAdmin to work with the database.

Hopefully you came to realize that the deployment process itself is not particularly complex for a Drupal site, since the only real configuration work that needs to be done is modifying the settings.php file to reflect your new system's configuration. Having the complexity of the site's deployment reduced to configuring a single file is a real advantage for Drupal users.

While the actual deployment of the site is fairly simple, it was shown that there were quite a few issues to deal with, and not the least of them is testing. It is critical that a full suite of tests is carried out on any site before it goes live—losing valuable users to silly errors is the last thing that any competitive site needs.