Features Everywhere...Feature-Driven Development!

Demonstrating the benefits of utilizing Features as part of your every day development workflow

This session aims to build and expand on prior presentations on Features, including: Jay Callicott and Matt Connerton’s Drupalcamp Atlanta presentation on “Rapid Drupal Development using Features and Drush” and Jay’s Drupal Dojo session on Feature-driven development.

For Drupal developers, it can be difficult to keep up with the newest and latest trends and understand how they all intertwine. Many questions come up such as:

• Should I use Context or Panels or both?
• What is the real underlying purpose of Features?
• What is exportable, what is not?
• How do all these tools play nicely together?

We are going to ramp up developers Features know-how in this presentation by exploring the power of combining Context, Panels, Content Types and Views. We will show how reusing these modules can assist in the rapid development of Drupal sites, deployment, maintenance and even collaboration.

We will focus on packaging these tools in a creative way to build duplicable, pre-configured Feature modules. We will show several real world use cases of how Features are not only for big distributions like OpenAtrium and OpenPublish, but also the every day developer who wants to refine his development work-flow.

To recap, the subject matter will include:

• Packaging Views, Panels, Content Types, Context into a reusable Feature
• Adding Hooks to your Feature module
• Feature deployment, reverting and updating Features
• Using Drush to update Features quickly from the command line
• Export more with Features Extra & exporting things that are not exportable
• Case studies to showcase real world examples

This session is intended for intermediate to advanced level attendees that want to find out what the Features buzz is all about or learn how to leverage Features to the fullest.

Jay Callicott is a Lead Drupal Architect for Mediacurrent, an Atlanta, GA based Drupal consultancy. Jay lives in Little Rock, AR and has been a Drupal fanatic for over 5 years (since version 4.6). As a side project, Jay is the lead developer for OpenChurch, a Drupal distribution for religious organizations. You can follow me @drupalninja on Twitter!