Split the Commons Core feature into single features

It's being worked on for sure. The problem is that most features and most exports are tied into other things. Views have fields and filters for certain components, panels contain blocks that come from a handful of other components, etc, etc...

it'll get done though. This is just something that time hasn't allowed yet.

+1 I will see to contribute as far I get confident with the code!

First I want to thank Drupal Commons for putting together this great solution. As I have posted on many places, I am quite a new to Drupal. I would like to excuse in advance if the following sounds very ignorant, but I am trying to gauge just how customizable Drupal commons is at the moment:

1) Can one add modules to it?
2) Can one disable any of it modules?
3) How much can one change from the current site settings used on the example site currently hosted in Drupal Commons.

Thanks,
JP

Hi @JP

1) Yes you can, I suggest you to upload your modules in the sites/all/modules folder

2) As I'm new to Drupal Commons as well, I suggest you before disabling any default modules that belong to the Drupal Commons distribution to do that in a Test Environment.
for example on your local xampp installation and see if anything you wish to disable does not compromise the core feature of Drupal Commons core system

3) As for Drupal modular system and also for the attention that the Acquia Drupal Commons development team to use standard Drupal configuration and structure as mostly successfully contributed modules there are no limits in how you may expand and custom your Drupal Commons installation.

Subscribing

It seems to me that breaking one big feature in several features sounds great. Even if this will required a lot of refactoring work ... (and i mean it, because i'm trying to see if i can do this in a big project : one or two features was the easiest way to export configuration, and it works, but we loose many advantages of using features )

Also, it means that all exportables should come back to database before they can get exported again in a another features. Or at least it requires some quite difficult "copy/paste" between features, with a lot of "search and replace" to adjust hook_names etc...

Drupal Commons and open atrium are two great Drupal distributions, and sure that open atrium / dev seed paradigm (small packages of configuration which satisfy a certain use-case) is a great way to achieve distributions with Drupal. Even if in real world, it is not so easy to decide how features have to be separated and how make them as independant as possible, sometimes.

I'm also working on a small module to help me building features when time is come to put configuration in code. http://drupal.org/node/897334

Anyway, drupal commons is certainly a very good candidate to take advantages of what features module can bring, maybe in combination with module "spaces", as someone said above, to allow users or OG to personnalize the features they need in their particular context.

+1 on breaking these out within the feature, perhaps at least the way OA does this, so some things can be turned off if not needed. As it's likely DC will be used with other contributed modules added to it, this seems an important performance consideration.

Acquia said it will be in the next realease "Break apart the single, monolithic Commons feature into as many logical features as practical within the time we have to do it. This will simplify upgrading, and make it easier to turn various capabilities on and off." http://commons.acquia.com/blog/drupal-commons-release-12-work-underway-r...

How can we help ?

I find this post of Funny Monkey particulary interesting

May be it would help to open up the process as it seems to be a very tricky & time consuming process.

Many eyes could help at least to test it out ;)

There are also interesting insight to find in OpenPublish and other process

Attached is what you can expect in 1.2 for split-up features.