Drupal Features Are Incredibly Easy

I have been following the buzz about Features since the folks at Development Seed started talking up the project earlier this year. I've used Features second-hand through distributions like Open Atrium and Managing News but hadn't had a chance to dig into the module. When I finally did find the time to make my own Feature I was amazed how easy it is.

Features takes advantage of how modules like Views, CCK, and Imagecache can export their configurations into code. This is not new and anyone could export Views and Content Types into modules. At Zivtech we do this regularly once a site has passed a certain development stage.

The genius of Features is how easy it makes exporting these configurations. On the user side is a simple UI for selecting components. On the backend the export creates a full module gzipped and ready to go.

See my feature here: http://aaroncouch.info/galleriffic-gallery-feature

Community features: http://community.featureservers.org/aggregator/sources

Cool vid: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/may/29/making-and-using-features-dr...

My one problem with Features is the fact that there is no way to tell what version of a module you are using. Since modules change as they are developed this could lead to conflicts. Looks like this will be solved in Drupal 7: http://drupal.org/node/627112