The Features module is a powerful tool that are often used by developers to turn views and content types that they frequently establish site-after-site into their own custom module, making new site development far more efficient. Mrconnerton's talk, Rapid Drupal Development using Features, shows this process very successfully and is a must-view for anyone working on multiple Drupal sites.

Features, however, also offers us a powerful solution for developing a single site with a team and, even more notably, maintaining a single site long-term, and using features to safely, efficiently and seamlessly push changes (in views, content types, and more) up stream onto a production site. This talk will focus on this solution.

What will be covered:

• Use cases for features on single-site development, citing the examples we use at Cherry Hill (including ICANN sites and Foss4lib.org)
• A general workflow for using features for team development and single-site maintenance
• What can be featurized
• Reviewing a featured element to determine what might have changed
• Updating and reverting features
• Using features to put things like your views and content types, etc. into code, and then into git
• Using features for safely deploying configuration changes to your production site

Who should attend?

• Anyone who works with a team to develop large sites, and who doesn't already use features as readily as using git for site work
• Site owners who need to come up with safe methods to update aspects of their site traditionally changed in configuration (views, content types, etc.)
• Anyone who puts their hands into site configuration but doesn't, yet, use features

Drupal 7 vs. Drupal 8

As much as possible, we will also discuss the differences between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. The examples in this talk will focus on Drupal 7, and the concepts are useful in both versions. Drupal 8, however, has more built-in tools for deploying site configuration, reserving Features for more specific use-cases.