BDUG 9/23: Using Features to move site recipes between sites

This month at the Berkeley Drupal Users Group (BDUG) we'll be talking about Drupal's Features (https://drupal.org/project/features) module. UC Berkeley's IST Drupal staff will give a demonstration of using Features to move "site recipes" from one site to another.

In Drupal, a site recipe is a set of instructions for building something, like a blog or a photo gallery, using Drupal core or contributed modules. A list of Drupal site recipe examples can be found at https://drupal.org/documentation/site-recipes. Typically a site recipe involves steps like enabling modules, adding content types, adding views, and setting up permissions and other configuration.

Let's say you've built a blog on one site and decide that you'd like a similar blog on a different site. Rather than repeating all the steps in the site recipe again for the new site, the Features module allows you to apply the same configuration as a starting point, potentially saving you significant time that you can use to learn and build new things instead of doing the same steps over and over.

In this session, we will "featurize" a few site recipes to demonstrate the power of Features to bundle functionality for easy deployment. We'll also do a quick side-by-side comparison between Features 1.0 and 2.0, and then use Features 2.0 for the demos to take advantage of the improved UI and functionality.

Time permitting, we can also look at the following:

1. Using drush and features
2. Overriding features
3. Managing changes between environments (local/dev/test/live)
4. Adding custom code to your feature
5. Using git (version control) with features

Berkeley Drupal Users Group: Monday, 9/23/13, 12-1:30pm
WHERE: UC Berkeley Campus: Barrows Hall 60 (basement room)
MAP: http://groups.drupal.org/berkeley/map