1. FEATURES MODULE
Drupal 7 Webinar

2. Presented By

3. Prasad Shirgaonkar
Curriculum
Developer,
Acquia Learning
Services"
• Designs and conducts
Training programs on Drupal
and Acquia Products!
• Over 20 years of Industry
experience, 7 years on
Drupal!
• In past, worked on 200+
Drupal projects @prasadshir

4. The Config
Management
Challenge
How to copy or move
site configurations
between environments?

5. Drupal Development Workflow
GIT$
DB$
CODE$
DB$
CODE$
DB$
CODE$

6. Drupal Site Components
Code%
• Modules%
• Themes%
Config%
ura3ons%
• Content%Types%
• Views%
Content%
• Nodes%
• Terms%

7. Drupal Site Components
Code
Files
Database
Database
Code%
• Modules%
• Themes%
Config%
ura3ons%
• Content%Types%
• Views%
Content%
• Nodes%
• Terms%

8. Initial Development
DB#
CODE#
GIT#
DB#
CODE#
DB#
CODE#
DB#
CODE#
In#Sync!#

9. Continuous Workflow
DB#
CODE#
DB#
CODE#
Changed#

10. How do we manage
site configurations?

11. Features
There’s a module for that!

12. drupal.org/project/features

13. Features Module
• Enables the capture
and management of
features in Drupal. !
• A feature is a
collection of Drupal
entities which taken
together satisfy a
certain use-case.!
• Converts and stores
site configurations in
code rather than in
DB!

14. Features Applications
• Move your site configurations from database
to code making them easier to
• Move between environments
• Check-in in a version control system
• Distribute independently as ‘features’ and
re-use across different sites

15. Demo

16. More Discussion
Understanding intricacies and
extending Features

17. Features Terminology
• Revert
• Changes your site
configuration in
DB to match up
with the
definitions in the
feature module
code.
• Code —> DB
!
• Update
• Produces a
modified version
of your feature
module code,
which matches up
with the
configuration
found in the DB.
• DB —> Code

18. What can be ‘feature’ized
• Core
• Content Types
• Vocabularies
• User Roles
• Permissions
• Fields
• Text Formats
• Menus
• Image Styles
• Contrib
• Views
• Panels
• Rules
• Contexts
• Display Suite

19. What cannot be ‘feature’ized
• Content
• Nodes
• Terms
• Users
• Custom Blocks

20. Advanced Usage
• Strongarm Module
• Use for exporting Variables like site name,
slogan etc
• Diff Module
• For comparing difference between code and DB
• Drush Integration
• features-list (fl), features-components (fc),
features-diff (fd)
• features-export (fe), features-revert (fr), features-
update (fu)

21. Resources
• Features Module on D.O.
https://drupal.org/project/features
• Features Module Documentation
https://drupal.org/documentation/modules/
features
• Strongarm Module
https://drupal.org/project/strongarm
• Diff Module
https://drupal.org/project/diff

22. Q + A
Your questions please!