Last month at DrupalCon Boston I presented with Jeff Miccolis on implementing a formal context system in Drupal. We had a lot of ideas to share and some proof of concept code to demo. Since then we’ve been working hard to clean up our code and our concepts.

The basic idea behind the context module is to allow different parts of the Drupal stack to expose key pieces of logic to other parts in a standardized fashion. Context_ui extends this core functionality by allowing users to create context definitions — bundles of views, content types, panels, menu items, and blocks — that can be used to model “sections” or “features” on your Drupal site, among other things.

The core context module and two add-on modules are available in the Drupal CVS repository. If you are a site builder or a themer you should take context_ui for a spin — it streamlines some of the trickier tasks involved in gluing a Drupal site together. We wouldn’t recommend any of these modules for production use yet as they are all moving quickly. You can grab them here: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/contributions/modules/context

In the next screencast, we’ll take a look at how other modules can leverage context_ui’s export and override functions to build fully functional module features out of the box.