Blog

A bunch of the Affinity Bridge crew went down to Seattle the weekend before last for the much anticipated Pacific North West Drupal Summit - Mack, Robin, Shiraz, Shawn, and myself (Ariane) made it down (Zoe was meant to come but picked up a cold in Italy and didn't want to contagious it to everyone), and Dave Tarc and Scott Nelson who have been collaborating on a couple projects rounded out the posse. It's always great catching up with the rest of the PNW Drupallers, it really is a hotbed of Drupal activity, and we were lucky enough to be joined by many of our Drupal friends and colleagues who came in from Portland, Idaho, and even Montana.

(Thanks for the sweet photo to Steve Krueger of The Jibe)

This post is part of our Abridged series, which aims to explain the basics of some of the more ominous yet awesome Drupal projects in simple and practical terms. We hope these posts will help demystify some of these projects for people who have been hesitant to try them out!

Here, we'll take a look at the Features module, created by the fine people at Development Seed, including a review of the challenges that led to its creation, the current state of the module, how to start using it, resources, and a note on how we've been using it ourselves.

Background

Everyone who's spent hours doing the same site configurations over and over again, for one site and then another, knows how repetitive config tends to be.  Install profiles have been the main tool for avoiding this work for the last couple years, but even with the (now defunct) install profile wizard, many people found them to be a bit overwhelming to figure out and start using at a production level.  Yet install profiles have grown to be fairly well used, especially since they can be customized and reused for certain types of sites - sport teams, churches, radio stations, languages, etc. - there's a big list of them here.