Deployment & Build Systems & Change Management

When I look at the current state of configuration storage in Drupal, I cannot stop myself of saying, what’s this monster?

I’m not a developer, so bear with me if my explanations are not 100% correct. This is the point of view of someone moderately comfortable with drupal concepts, with an artistic background.

What we have now

Drupal has always been storing configuration (views, variables, content types definitions, website timezone, whatever) in a database.

It's for another "bi-weekly" IRC meeting! I've been trying to get these going more frequently but it has been really difficult as I've started planning my move and the like.

The meeting will take place in the #drupal-cmi channel on Freenode at 20.00 UTC.

Here are some agenda items for this meeting:

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I had several conversations around CMI at BADCamp a few weeks ago, which I have attmpted to summarize here.

First off I had a long conversation with yched about how to implement fields in the config api. There are several aspects to this that are tricky.

Field API : Config files layout

We are talking about a file layout like this:

Last Wednesday I had a Skype conversation with Angie Byron (webchick), Francesco Placella (plach), Gábor Hojtsy and Jose Reyero to discuss how we are going to implement multilingual functionality in the Drupal 8 configuration system. For a little background, the configuration management system will be using XML files to store configuration. These files will be loaded into an 'active store' (the database by default, but pluggable) which will act as the source for configuration at all times.

We had a really productive IRC meeting last night, the log has been attached to this post. Highlights:

I will be attending spending a lot of time traveling to Drupal events in September and October, and I am hoping to run CMI initiative code sprints at all of them! There will be other initiative owners at the US events as well, so I would not be surprised to see coding going on around those topics as well. Our main focus here will be around the file-based config system and enhancements to the entity system. For those who are not local to these events, you can join #drupal-cmi on IRC to participate virtually.

I will be holding a code sprint for the Configuration Management Initative at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit on Sunday, October 16. We will meet up in the Hacker's Lounge and run until we all pass out. While I will be focusing on my initiative, I would be happy to provide guidance for anyone interest in getting involved in the other initiatives as well. See you all there!

I am going to start holding IRC meetings every other week to discuss and plan issues around the configuration management initiative. These meetings will be held every other Tuesday at 19:00 UTC. In real world terms this currently translates to

11:00 - US West coast (PST)
13:00 - US Midwest (CST)
14:00 - US East coast (EST)
20:00 - UK (BST)
21:00 - Most of Europe (CEST)

Here is a short summary of what we discussed at the Drupalcon London.

There has been a core conversation talk by Peter Wolanin and me, of which you can find the video here and the slides here.

Roadmap

The further roadmap is to:

• define the API + do a test entity type
• port a core entity
• do performance testing
• implement revisions + port node and other entity types
• refactor field storage

Performance testing basically should be repeated after every step.

Status

• There is a first patch that moves the entity API in its own module, which we need to get in first.
  http://drupal.org/node/1018602 -> Needs review.
• There is an issue for implementing basic CRUD and porting a first entity type: comment
  http://drupal.org/node/1184944 - work in progress
• We've worked on defining the basics of the API at the Drupalcon codesprint (see below).