configuration

As a follow up to the previous post talking about our (re)branding process, we wanted to share with you some of the details of the new theme for our site, as well as a few configuration changes, and what we learned.

960 Grid-based Theme

In an earlier post, our theme lead Alberto talked a bit about CSS Frameworks, including the 960 Grid System, which is compatible with Drupal's Zen framework. Those are two of the main tools in his theming toolkit, so we made sure to get a theme designed that would comply with using the grid system. Alberto then took the layout CSS file from the 960 Framework and substituted that for the layout CSS file in Zen, but otherwise used all the other Zen files.

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.