features

Some time ago, a client asked me about the features module. He wanted to know what the features module is about and how it can help him with his project. Their set up was a pretty complex e-commerce application involving multiple content types and integration with 3rd party services. Yet, they were not using features and would manually replicate any changes from the developer's machine to the server. He was concerned about maintaining the site and how he could add some new functionality without breaking the existing configuration. My recommendation was that they start using features. He had not idea what it was so I wrote him an email explaining. Read on my full reply.

Features is one of those modules we can not do without. One annoying issue with features is that it is slow. The bigger the drupal site, the slower the features UI pages load. And waiting for the page to load is one of the most disturbing things during drupal development.

Adding a new component to a feature is a multistep process: Go the features page, add the component to the feature, download the feature, remove the old feature and extract the new one. And repeat many times during the day.

Fortunately, we can speed this process quite a bit. Drush to the rescue again! This post is going to explain how to use drush to add new components to a feature.

Features is a must have tool for deploying drupal sites. Features can be used for storing the website configuration in files, instead of the database. It can for example allow you to store a view in a file. You can then commit this code to your repo as usual.
Must of the site's configuration is stored in variables. Features, when used with strongarm, can be used to also export those variables from your staging env to your production. You can always find the name of the variable, by inspecting the html code. I use another trick to easily locate the variable name:

You can use

to get the value of variable. For example,

will return 1 or 0, depending on the value of the caching parameter set in admin/config/development/performance. If you dont know exactly the name of the variable, you can for example do a