I think I've got this thing figured out.

So I successfully and very quickly updated Z-Com and all my testbed sites to Drupal 6.10 today, and it was pretty painless. Combined with the various and somewhat constant little module upgrades, it all goes very smoothly now. I wish I could fully automate it, but I suppose it's good that there's still a hands-on component to site management.

I deployed my first all-Drupal site last week and I think it's pretty good: www.360teambuilding.com. Next up is going to be University Animal Hospital, which is a rebuild of an existing site with new art direction and some snazzy new fuctionality. Check out the testbed at www.z-com.com/uah/.

I think the next big thing I'm going to focus on is dialing in the back-end experience for my site owners. It's all still very Drupal-y back there, and I don't want to make them learn a ton of stuff they'll have no use for other than managing their site. I hadn't realized how much I emphasized that in my old way of designing sites, until I suddenly felt like I had very little control over how the admin stuff was presented in Drupal. I mean, yeah, there's very fine-grain control over granting permissions over things, and that's pretty great, but there's still a lot of information overloading happening behind the scenes.