In my region we have a "Start to run" program that guides you on your journey to help you run longer distances guided by motivational music.

This session will guide you through the Drupal isles of Export and will try to teach you something new. And no, this something new is not Features, it's back to basics with the aid of the Ctools exportables toolkit and a nifty small module formerly known as Knapsack. This module is different when we compare it with features as it exports "all the things" into 1 module. There are some use-cases where you do not need to re-use your exports, and this fits module is your solution for that use-case.

So once we waded through this Isle of Export, we will continue our tour to the Isle of CI where we will use a build process and a make file, in combination with basic Drupal profiles, to make sure that no other human being makes human being mistakes and tries to modify a module without properly patching it.

As every site has a unique recipe for success (read: a number of specific versions or dev-versions of specific contrib modules) and to ensure that our recipe to our new site stays known and that a dev version of a module not suddenly is updated without knowing the change we will monitor our site-codebase with the outcome of our recipe.

So, this might sound very cryptic but in the end it lets you sleep better at night as you know what is going inside your site. Knowledge is power.

I hope this will be of interest for many.