Development Seed

This Thursday, Young Hahn, Robert Soden, and myself will share with you in our DrupalCon presentation how we build websites in less time by making what we’re calling “prefabricated features”. Not only will we give a formal presentation on Thursday, but we’ll hold an hour long BOF (Birds of a Feather) session each afternoon and build the feature of your choice, or draw up a recipe of how it could be done.

Think of a feature as a main section of your site. A blog, a pressroom, a photo gallery, or a publications library complete with a faceted search interface could each be thought of as a feature. Each can be built with CCK, views, and a couple other tools and each consists of multiple components that we can tie together into a turn-key module ready to be used on any Drupal site.

By building sites with feature, we are becoming faster site builders by the site. A main key to our speed are these prefabricated “features”, or “prefabs” for short. We use essential building blocks in Drupal like CCK and Views, seal them all together with Context, then turn them on with Spaces. CCK and views are like our bricks, context is the cement, and Spaces provides different foundations upon which to bring our features to life. What someone might normally labor over for hours we can “featureize” and turn on in a matter of seconds on any future website we build.

Be sure to stop by our “Paradigm for Reusable Drupal Features” BOFs starting Wednesday, and continuing through Friday. We’ll be there ready to build your feature, write up a recipe, or answer any questions you may have about feature building. You may also have luck finding us at the Development Seed table when we’re not in a session or participating in the BOFs if you’d like to talk feature shop.

You may find the following related background posts valuable:

Spaces: A Paradigm for Reusable Drupal Features Building a ‘Blog Feature’ in Drupal with Context and Spaces Defining Spaces Features in Code in Drupal

See you this week!