Would someone be able to briefly explain Features to me?

By Jlols on 9 Mar 2017 at 07:17 UTC

I've read the documentation, but honestly still don't understand it well enough. Would anyone be able to give me a simply (ELI5) explanation at all?

Here's what I think I know:

Features capture content changes, including adding panels, mini-panels and their settings
When creating a new feature from, say, your local site, you select which of these components (correct terminology?) you wish to include in it
You then download this feature as a zipped file. You take the contents and upload them to your remote server
This is where I get a bit fuzzy: you then find the feature you've created/updated in the remote site and 'recreate' it. This will essentially recreate the changes/additions you saved to the feature.

As for what 'overwritten' means, I guess that indicates that a previous features data has been overwritten. I am unclear as to what has overwritten it, though. You can 'revert' the feature to re-create it using the latest data.

Is this understanding correct?

Comments

Documentation is the key

sachinsuryavanshi commented 9 March 2017 at 10:08

Drual is widely famous coz of clean & tidy documentation for each module.

Give it a shot with calm mind and you will understand it. You can post your queries for Module difficulties and queries for the same.

use Google, YouTube Resources too.

Happy Learning !

Nope

yelvington commented 9 March 2017 at 14:27

Features capture content changes, including adding panels, mini-panels and their settings

Some settings might contain text, but that doesn't mean they qualify as "content" in the sense generally used in discussing Drupal. Those are configuration changes.

The point of the Features module is to turn configuration work into code, so that you can move it independently of data (content, users). You don't need the Features module to do a lot of this -- look for "export" and "import" functionality in various Drupal modules. But exporting and importing manually through a copy/paste process doesn't scale very well. The Features module lets you bundle up your work, and since it's code, it can go through a version control process.

Here's an example. You build a site in your dev environment. When you're finished, you copy the whole thing (files, database) to a production server. Your production environment grows over time and content accumulates daily.

Meanwhile, you want to develop and test proposed changes. Easy enough on your dev server, right? But when you're done, how do you migrate those changes to your live site without clobbering the content? Sure, you can reproduce every one of your changes manually, but it's going to take time, and there's danger that you'll miss a step.

That's where Features saves you: Your dev configuration changes are rolled up into code that can be exported, versioned, promoted to the live site, and implemented without entanglement in the content.