The Nuvole presentation at Drupal Dev Days Barcelona

Features are a well-known and very useful tool to streamline Drupal development and write reusable components. However, if you get serious about automating as much as possible in your Drupal development, you need to add other tools to your daily practices, and master them properly: forget the tedious, error-prone, point-and-click and embrace Code-Driven Development.

Automating Drupal Development, as presented by Nuvole at the Drupal Developer Days Barcelona last week, consists of the following steps:

1. Automating code retrieval. Use Drush Make to keep track of modules, patches and Features, and rely on Buildkit as a basic distribution with preselected modules to make your development faster. Use Drush Bake to create makefiles based on templates.
2. Automating installation. Customize the installation profile to perform all tasks you need during installation, especially pre-configuring your site with those "soft configuration" settings that the site administrator will be able to modify without overriding your Features.
3. Automating site configuration. Use Features properly, to make them truly modular, and install a Features server, where you will host and track your Features.
4. Automating tests. Use continuous integration to automatically ensure that your website will continue to work as expected when it is upgraded: test your codebase, installation and site configuration on every code change.

These concepts will be covered in more detail in the Nuvole DrupalCon Munich Training (if you don't see the page, you may need to register to the DrupalCon Munich website).

The full presentation from Barcelona is below, as a Slideshare embed or a PDF file (attached).

Automating Drupal Development: Makefiles, features and beyond View more presentations from Nuvole
Tags: Code Driven DevelopmentDrupal PlanetDrupalConAttachments: Download PDF