Posted by Steven_NC on November 19, 2010 at 10:22pm
After the TriDUG meeting a few of us continued our talks at another venue. Install Profiles, Features, Drush, and general site maintenance was discussed.
I saw this article today:
http://awebfactory.com.ar/node/458
and it corrected much of my thinking on the subject. I hope it helps others.
Steven
Comments
Interesting article
I'm very sorry I was unable to attend this meetup. The article you posted a link to is interesting; I'd also love to hear what other folks have to say on the subject if anybody feels like continuing the conversation here, or rehashing some of what was talked about at the meeting.
So basically the platonic
So basically the platonic ideal is some method of putting together a feature set and then deploying it to one or more sites without a bunch of fiddling around. When it's time to upgrade this should also require a minimum of drudge work.
Work is being done on a number of approaches intended to get us there. At time of writing the state of the art misses this mark for a number of reasons and the problems inherent in pulling this off smoothly are proving somewhat intractable.
My favorite current example of this would be an events calendar feature. You can build an installation profile that includes CCK, Date & Date API, Calendar, CCK exports of your event content type and some custom UI work to smooth it all out and that's great. But if I've got an existing site it's not like I can use this installation profile to add an events calendar, this is only really useful during site creation.
Features is a better fit if you want to add stuff on the fly but it comes with it's own problems with module updates.
Larger "full feature" modules (like a Forum module that actually implements 100% of the feature set of PHPbb) could improve certain aspects of this equation but that sort of thing really only represents shuffling pain around since they'll by definition be substantially more trouble to develop and support and there will always be situations where a canned solution isn't going to be a good fit for a particular site.
Unfortunately I couldn't make
Unfortunately I couldn't make it to the last meeting. I wrote a blog post about this recently. It's an interesting topic. Features are really helpful in site building and managing deployments from dev > staging > production environments.