What is CMI?

One of the major features of Drupal 8 is the Configuration Management Initiative (CMI). I’ll briefly touch on why CMI is so important, but our own Alex Pott has written extensively on the creation, principles and importance of this feature.

Previous to Drupal 8, it was cumbersome to trade configuration between sites and environments. Moving configuration changes from a developmental environment into production meant either making the changes manually through the UI, or utilizing an advanced option like Features. A third option would be full-database swapping, but that can be quite risky and is generally considered poor-form.