Building and Deployment of

Drupal sites with Features and Context

by Svilen Sabevat DrupalCamp Sofia 2011on 23 Jan 2011

We love Drupal because Drupal is robust content management system with

great possibilities that can be used to build almost any kind of website

Drupal has a lot of contributed modules to solve problems and to make different desirable solutions

Drupal has great community all over the world

Frequent tasks create content types and CCK fields create taxonomy vocabularies and terms configure imagecache presets create views to display content build panel pages to position content setup user roles and permissions

Problems Business decisions and configuration settings are

in database Making changes and deployment is time

consuming and error prone process No history log of modifications No organization of site’s features

The Solution A module that would automatically package any

of your site’s features into another module for you to download and share

Features module Features is a Drupal module created by

Development Seed

Features provides a UI and API for taking different site building components from modules with exportables and bundling them together in a single feature module

http://drupal.org/project/features

Features moves configuration from the database to code

Features lets you organize your project

Features lets you control your site’s features with version-controlled systems

Features makes deployment easy

Features lets you share and reuse configurations

What can be exported? Content types CCK fields Views Imagecache presets Ctools (Panels, Variables, Feeds, Data and more) User roles and permissions Menus and menu links Input formats Context

What is difficult to be exported?

Vocabularies Nodequeues Nodes, Terms and Users *

because Features hates sequential IDs

http://drupal.org/project/features_extrahttp://drupal.org/project/uuid_features

Let’s see Features in demo

Think how to organize Separate features by context

(News, Events, Gallery, Videos, Homepage) Separate features by components

(Imagecache, Views, Panels, Permissions, Menus) Make reusable features Don’t share same CCK field with different

configurations between two features Be careful with dependencies

Deployment process Build on development site locally

Show staging site to the client

Update the result on production site

Workflow of Deployment Process in team

Darin create a content type and the CCK fields on his local development site. He package everything as a feature and commit that module to the repository

I update my repository, install the feature and automatically receive the configuration that Darin created. I add couple views and imagecache presets and attach them to that feature.

Darin update and make adjustments on fields. He commits the changes.

I update and overwrite styles for views and commit again.

Jens update his repository and fixes our configurations. He commits the changes to our staging site and install the feature. If the client is satisfied he can upload the feature to production site.

The advantages Every feature modification is logged

Features makes deployment easy

Features makes reuse of configuration possible

Changes by clients will be logged and can be easily reverted.

Component statesFeature keeps tracks on following things to define its component states:

Current configuration in code Change of current configuration in code with svn

update Configuration represented in database

Features determines components in following states:Default, Overridden, Needs Review, Rebuilding, Conflict

Drush and Featuresdrush features List all the available features on your site

and their status.

drush features-export [feature name] [component list]

Write a new feature in code containing the components listed.

drush features-update [feature name]

Update the code of an existing feature to include any overrides from your database

drush features-revert [feature name]

Revert a feature in your site's database to the state described in your code

drush features-diff [feature name]

Show a diff between a feature's database components and those in code.

Kit

A set of guidelines that facilitates building compatible and interoperable Feature modules.

KIT Feature Specification (kitf 1.0-draft) KIT Theme Specification (kitt 1.0-draft)

http://drupal.org/project/kit

Context module Context allows you to manage contextual

conditions and reactions for portions of your site.

Conditions are set of rules that are checked during page load to see what context is active.

Any reactions that are associated with active contexts are then fired.

Think for context like sections of the site

Basic “News” context Conditions

Menu item “News” is clicked Node type “News” is opened

Reactions Menu item “News” is active News categories block in right sidebar

Define context layoutslayouts[columns][name] = "Columns"layouts[columns][description] = "Three column

layout."layouts[columns][stylesheet] = "layout-columns.css"layouts[columns][template] = "layout-columns"layouts[columns][regions][] = "header"layouts[columns][regions][] = "content"layouts[columns][regions][] = "left"layouts[columns][regions][] = "right"

Drupal ThursdaysFor you that want to learn advanced Drupal from

the developers and themers in Propeople

Location: Sofia, Pirin 40A streetDate: Every Thursday from ~19.30

More info: http://groups.drupal.org/bulgaria

We’re hiring Team Lead / Senior PHP developer PHP / Drupal developers Senior HTML developer

Interested? Talk with Welin or Rumen

Thank You!Any questions?