Site Development with Features

Last updated on
17 August 2016

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A feature is a collection of Drupal configurations that are intentionally grouped together to satisfy a particular use case. These configurations can be used for content type declarations, views, module settings, and roles and permissions, among other things.

Why is this of interest to site builders, developers, and administrators? One example where features might be useful is for packaging the configurations of a custom content type that, for example, includes a view, various types of fields, and a custom display mode. Each of these configurations represents an essential component of the custom content type, but to export or share the content type would require moving each of these components individually, which can quickly get unwieldy. The Features module allows you to create a single package of components that can then be exported or shared in a much more simple manner than moving a group of independent components. This functionality makes Features a useful tool for site configuration management, version control, and feature sharing among numerous sites.

Features are attractive to site builders because they can save a great deal of time and guesswork during migration from a local development environment to a remote staging or production environment. The Features module provides a centralized place for managing exportable components and writing them to code. Features are packaged as individual modules and can be turned on and off. Because they are ported as code, you can also use features to manage version control.

This article will explain how the Features module can be used to manage site configuration and version control.

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