Export your Features in Drupal

This time we're joined by Palantir.net Engineer Kelsey Betham who tells us all about exporting features in drupal, including why and when you should, and how doing so could be a huge benefit should something go horribly wrong with your site. The full transcript of the episode is below.

We'll be back next week with another episode of the Secret Sauce hosted by Account Manager Allison Manley, but for now subscribe to all of our episodes – including our monthly long-form interview series called On the Air With Palantir – over on iTunes.

Transcript

AM: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a super short podcast, just a few minutes every week, that offers a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. 

I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Kelsey Betham, one of our fantastic engineers, who is going to talk about exporting your features in drupal.

KB: Hi. I’m Kelsey Bentham and I’m going to tell you about why should should export all of your features. This seems like the sort of thing you don’t need to do after you launch your site. But you’d be wrong, because at some point or another someone else is going to have to set up your site. Whether it’s because they are fixing a bug, or they are learning how it works, they’ll need to know what’s going on. And if you don’t keep your features up to date and exported, the only place that information will exist will be in your database. And there’s a chance that something, somewhere, will go horribly wrong, and you want to have it backed up in as many ways as you can manage. 

And you can backup your features by going in through the Drupal Admin interface. You can log in with a user that has the appropriate permissions to update your features. Go to the “Configuration” menu on your Drupal site and go to “Features.” Here you will find a helpful list of all of your features and their current status: whether they be up to date with your database, or in some way different. 

If you have the Diff Module installed you can also check to see exactly how the code differs from the database. You’ll want to check on this to see exactly what’s changed and be able to verify that all the changes that have been made are changes that you actually want to keep. Once you verify that all the changes you have are ones that you should have, you can go and click on the “Recreate the Feature” button. This will allow you to export the feature to exactly where it is, but updated with all your current configurations.

Doing this sort of thing will help in the long run because it makes it much much easier to ramp people up on projects, as well as keeping anyone outside of the immediate project team aware of exactly how things are working at any given time. 

Thank you very much for listening, and I hope that you keep all of your features updated in the future!

AM: Thanks for listening to this week’s Secret Sauce! For more great tips, follow us on twitter at @palantir, or visit our website at palantir.net. Have a great day!