Drupal Wellington Meet-up + Slides (Packaging & Deployment)

Wellington, New Zealand had its first Drupal Meet-up last night since DrupalSouth, New Zealand's Drupal conference, in January this year. We had a good number of people turn out from all over Wellington to share and talk about what they're doing with Drupal. Myself and Mike Haworth both gave presentations on Drupal, mine was on packaging and deployment with Drupal - in particular, where features and drush have their part to play in the process. Attached are my slides for people to look over and/or use (CC license, Attribution required).

Features Tutorial - How to make a feature.

IMO, features has been the missing component to Drupal for a long time. Ever since Drupal stored configuration, specific to your project in the database. That makes moving a change in you project from development to staging and to production rather complex and time consuming. While modules like Views and CCK implemented there own exporting techniques, really, the entire Drupal community needed to implement an exportable facet to the modules they offer. Features is quickly providing that facet. With features, out of the box, you can export custom views, content types, imagecache presets, permissions, panels and with strongarm and ctools, variables from the variables table. Here is a how to guide to using features as a Drupal site developer.