Greetings UMN Drupaleers!
Our next UMN Drupal Users meeting will take place Thursday, September 25th, from noon to 1:00pm.
101 Walter Library
117 Pleasant St SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
This month we will enjoy a presentation by Brad Lowry on using Drupal's Features module.
When you use Drupal's Web-based administrative tools to build a content type, a View, or other structural or workflow tools, this data is normally saved in Drupal's database. This, of course, can complicate deployment workflows because typically, we consider "code" to be deployed from dev to production, while "content," always stored in the database, typically moves from production down to dev as needed to ensure a reasonable facsimile for testing. Having new site features stored in a database that you'd have to push "the wrong way," or alternatively, having to repeat the whole manual setup process for a new feature independently on the production side, might be considered "unhelpful."
Features provides tools to export the results of custom configurations on your site as code, which can then be redeployed in other environments (not to mention committed to source control). Brad will guide us through some examples illustrating how Features are built and deployed, and how that process can work within a git-based dev-stage-prod workflow such as that available in our UMN Enterprise Drupal platform.
Please note that while this event is organized by the University of Minnesota Drupal Users Group, the content of this presentation is not University-specific, and anyone is welcome to attend.