March Meeting: Reusable & Deployable Drupal Sites

Thanks for the questions Katy,

Quick answers:

Reusable: A set of commonly used functionality placed in code that can be implemented on multiple projects. (Think of a blog which could have a content type with fields and comment configuration, a view, pathauto settings, and user permissions).
Deployable: The ability to deploy new feature requests to production sites in as few steps as possible.

Longer answers:

Quite often during the development of a Drupal website there is repetition of effort, especially once a site has launched and updates need to be made. Think about manually making a set of changes to a production server after making and testing those same changes on the development server, and after initially making the changes on your local environment.

Though Drupal is built this way by design (placing both content and configuration in the database), this practice of development breaks one of the first rules of programming which is Don't Repeat Yourself (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_repeat_yourself).

There are some exciting Drupal projects underway that address this, namely Features, Exportables, Install Profiles and Drush doing some of the heavy lifting along the way.

I'll be talking about using these tools to increase the efficiency of website development, deployment, and maintenance.

I was surprised so many people showed up, but i felt there were an incredible amount of smart people in the office.

As a full-time web developer specializing in Drupal, i never found it too difficult setting up dev environment, installing drupal and the same contrib modules. I usually have all the contrib modules and latest drupal pretty handy and it isn't really taxing on your brain when you upload or extract modules.

To look at it at a high level, i didn't feel making the "easy steps" easier too valuable. I did however like some elements, such as downloading latest modules automatically. Drush is super cool as well!

Also Shawn did a great job, I haven't had much experience with drush(super cool), features or installation profiles. I liked the idea of showing things on the spot, but i thought it would be better with more of a powerpoint format with keynotes and key take-aways from each slide. Just like many of you, I learn better researching, testing and playing around a new module/tool on my own, coming to a gathering like this, i much rather prefer something more on a higher level, such as, the features of a module, how this can be used, and what problems you have came across, and maybe a few configuration example. Or maybe it was just because it was hard to see near the back, it was probably just me =).

I learned a lot from how advance developers push items to production, the way i like to use drupal is to leverage the content management nature of the technology and make it as easy as possible for clients to update their own site. So whenever i am creating websites for clients, i would put that as #1, how easy is it to update the site? With the features module, and version control, it does seem to make it a lot tougher to achieve. I would love to see an elegant solution/balance to this.

Thanks everyone again,

Tom

Nice one Shawn! That was an awesome presentation and finally gave me the impetus I needed to start seriously looking at Features module. For production pushes, what we've been doing is coding everything in update functions, usually using the various helper functions provided by the Install Profile API, along with things like CCK Sync, and putting all our views in a .views_default.inc file in a utilities module. But it sounds like features can replace all of that and is way faster.
Thanks again and great to see everyone last night,

Katherine

I was sorry to miss this presentation. It sounded excellent. Is there any video or other record of the meeting that those of us who were unable to attend can access?

Thanks