Building and Maintaining a Distribution in Drupal 7 with Features
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Drupal 7 allows to easily build and maintain distributions, i.e. repeatable website templates; you can benefit from this in all cases, whether you aim at large-scale deployments or even at maintaining a single website.
We will show how to package core and contributed modules in a distribution by using a Makefile and a profile and keeping them up-to-date during the whole development cycle.
Then you will learn how to use Code-Driven Development to store all settings in a sustainable way: use the Features module to easily describe configuration in code, a proper separation between Features to make your code reusable and extendible, a well-thought design of Features to create easier development patterns, CTools and Exportables to put your configuration in code even when a module does not support it natively.
Last, we will see how the distributions update mechanism allows you to create a new version of your distribution for easy and painless configuration updates of a live site.
Intended audience
All developers who wish to benefit from a clean development workflow allowing collaboration, code reuse and safe updates. The distributions workflow can be applied to single sites too, with similar benefits.
Questions answered by this session
How do I design my Features properly?
How can I create a Drupal distribution?
How does the distributions approach allow a cleaner workflow in general?
How can I have a safe upgrade path for my sites?
How can I easily maintain a Drupal distribution?
Comments (2)
Drupal Dev Days
Question intended to the presenters : is it the same presentation than the one you did during the Drupal Dev Days ?
Similar concepts, new stuff
We will go through similar concepts because the one we presented during Drupal Dev Days is our standard workflow anyway, but this time we will focus on distributions, e.g., one of our running examples will be how to create features and integrate them in common Drupal distributions like OpenPublic by adopting the distributions workflow.