Packaging & Deployment

The testing phase is over... 3281d Consulting is extremely pleased to announce that the new distribution packaging system is now deployed on drupal.org. The announcement on the front page of drupal.org contains lots of details about how the system looks for end users of Drupal distributions, including lots of nice UI changes to project pages and release nodes.

If you maintain an installation profile on drupal.org please read the How to package a profile on drupal.org handbook page. It's really not that hard, but there are some very important things you need to read and understand to make use of the new system. Support requests and "bug reports" from people who just didn't read the handbook page won't be well received. ;) Oh, and speaking of issues, if you find one, please search the packaged install profiles tag before submitting a new one.

Exciting times -- go forth, yonder profile maintainers, and make Drupal more usable!

Thanks!
-Derek

I've just stumbled into features / contexts recently and it is simply awesome.

I am wondering if synchronization of settings are possible using features / context?

I have a test machine and a deployment machine, where files are synchorinized using a git.
i'd like a way to easily synchronize menu settings, example i use the admin module and enable / disable menu items's visibility. Also, i change the input filters settings. Now to migrate those to production machine, have to manually do everything.'

What techniques do everyone use for such tasks?

Bibek Shrestha

I really like that in Drupal 7 installation profiles will be treated as modules. However now that I started thinking about actual implementations, I'm wondering why they are not actual modules. For instance with DrupalMU the required modules and settings could be deployed both at the moment of installation as at a later date. The required modules and the function calls however would be identical in both cases. So what do I do? Do I make it a module that has a .module and a .profile file that works when dropped in either the sites/all/modules or in the /profiles directory?

I was playing around with integrating Atrium and the Features Server feature and thought I would share my basic process. This is in no way perfect but it's a start. Please add on other useful pieces of information.

I have been harboring some growing concerns about the direction of the plugin manager integration proposals for Drupal core almost since their inception, but have not been able to make an informed opinion on the subject until I had properly reviewed the proposed system on a much deeper scale.

While my impressions of the project and the current implementation are fairly negative, I have aimed to frame my criticisms in a positive constructive manner because I believe that the goals of the project are worthwhile, and that for a large section of users this could be a very flexible and usable solution.

Unfortunately a lot of my concerns have been well founded, and I believe that the implementation of this system needs to be taken in a different direction for it to be able to succeed in its goals, while not negatively affecting projects like Aegir, Open Atrium and many other ‘serious developers’.

Just watched this screencast http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2009/may/29/making-and-using-feature... and am really amazed by this.

Is there any place where features (not the module) can be downloaded from? To be able try this out with something like that Discography feature would be great.

To celebrate the launch of Drush 2.0, we’re handing out several I <3 Drush t-shirts.

If you want a shirt, what you need to do is make a screencast or blog post about how Drush has made your life easier. Show or explain how you used to do something manually, and how it’s much quicker and simpler with Drush. Once you’ve posted about Drush, tweet about it with the #drushrush tag, and we’ll select the top three posts and those authors will receive a t-shirts in the mail.

So start posting and happy drush’ing. Oh yeah, you can also buy the shirt over here but what fun is that.

We're proud to announce the first beta of the 0.2 release of the Aegir hosting system for Drupal.

Ægir is a set of contributed modules for Drupal that aims to solve the problem of managing a large number of Drupal sites. It does this by providing you with a simple Drupal based hosting front end for your entire network of sites. To deploy a new site you simply have to create a new Site node. To backup or upgrade sites, you simply manage your site nodes as you would any other node.

This release is the first beta release of our 0.2 development cycle, which has been focused on complete support for running multiple concurrent Drupal releases, and managing upgrades of sites between Drupal releases. This release has also primarily been focussed on fixing bugs and polishing the final release of the 0.2 release.