Building Features and Exportables: The Wave of the Drupal Future

Description

Exportables have become all the rage in drupal over the last year or so. They go a long way to solve the long standing issue in drupal that not only is content stored in the database, but much of the configuration of the site as well. That configuration is what makes your site different from the basic install that drupal ships with, and often is the real "work" in creating a drupal site. Because it lives in the database, it makes it hard to:

• Track changes to configurations overtime
• Store backups of just the configuration
• Revert to that backup if things get messed up
• Enable or Disable whole configuration sets (features)
• Reuse configurations on other sites.
• Work on configurations with more than one person
• Share configurations with the community

With Panels and Views configurations replacing what would otherwise have been code, the problem has become even more exaggerated. However, exportables allow you to get these configurations (and many more) out of the database and into code. Features is the exportables package manager. It allows you to create a group of configurations that comprise a "feature" of your site and export it into one (or a series) of modules. These are exciting times in drupal, and I expect features to be one of the next "essential" modules.

Agenda

This session has a wide audience. From those who are just site builders to hardcore developers that are looking for a big win in their development workflow.

We'll cover:

• The feature workflow using both the drupal GUI and the alternative drupal command line, drush.
• What things are exportable (and what are still not)
• How to choose what is a "feature"
• Making your custom tables "exportable"
• Feature "gotchas"

About the Presenter

I've been developing for drupal professionally since 2006, with a focus on social drupal sites. I founded my own drupal shop Twelve Grove Inc. and I am currently in NYC working on the artists site's platform at Sony music.