The Musician Stack: Using Features and Exportables to Make Your Own Flavor of Drupal

I’ll be demonstrating Crate — The musician-website-in-a-box created by Development Seed for Warner Music Group. It uses the Features module, and exportable strategies, to bundle together several standard site elements (photo galleries, video galleries, tour information, a store front, a community page) into a simple installation for artist websites. This strategy has greatly decreased our costs and time-to-market for whipping up new websites for new artists, new albums, or last minute appearances on Oprah.

The following topics will be covered:

• How to use Context to make your sidebars interesting — no more static blocks!
• How to build a new Feature from scratch — that’s right, we’ll build one during this very session in 5 minutes or less.
• How to create a base theme to make your Features look good immediately, and a subtheme to make pretty websites without reinventing the wheel.
• Drush is your new best friend — provisioning sites, updating features, automating updates and more with drush in your workflow.
• Rolling changes back into the platform — how to update all your sites, none of your sites, maximizing the work done on a one-off and sharing it with everyone, and basically being a feature communist. All for one and one for all!

This talk would be most useful for people doing the following kind of work:

• Making lots of websites that are at their core, relatively the same
• Offering hosted websites or software-as-a-service
• Supporting original features implemented with several different clients
• Large multi-site environments
• Centralized management of updates, feature releases, and keeping products up-to-date
• Anything Ning-like