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Drupal Voices 115: Young Hahn on Features and the future of Context

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Young Hanh (aka yhahn) gives some insight into some of the modules that have allowed Development Seed to customize the user experience of their Open Atrium Drupal distribution. At DrupalCon DC in 2009, Hahn predicted that exportable definitions would be the future of solving deployment problems, and went on from there to help develop the Features module. Over the past year, exportable definitions have played a huge part in fueling the rise of Drupal distributions. Context allows you to manage contextual conditions and reactions for different portions of your site. Spaces allow you to override the values of a Drupal object that would otherwise have a single, sitewide value. And Persistent URL (PURL) is an abstracted request handling API tool that allows you to pass URL arguments into different modules, which goes beyond the limitations of the existing core menu system.

Improving the request handling of Drupal core was one of the biggest architectural issues that was talked about amongst the Drupal developers during DrupalCon in looking forward to Drupal 8. You can find out more of their plans at the Butler group for the next steps for the and the initial request handling architecture brainstorming session.

Some other context-related modules mentioned are Panels, Panels everywhere, and the Display Suite.

For more information, check out Hahn's presentation called "The Heart of Open Atrium: Context, PURL and Spaces" as well as Jack Aponte's notes from the session.

June 8, 2010 - 11:47am
Drupal Voices
10:21 minutes (9.54 MB)
mono 44kHz 128Kbps (cbr)

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Comments

Larry Garfield (not verified) on June 8, 2010 - 10:51pm

Larry Crell?

Did Young just called me "Larry Crell"? John Van Dyk, you've got a lot to answer for!!! :-)

Otherwise, Young is right on. His summary is arguably better than the ones I've given. :-) Panels, Services, Context, Blocks, and others just sort of fold together into a single core system that works at a much lower level than we are able to now. That in turn allows all kinds of richer, more context-sensitive behavior throughout Drupal. Essentially both Panels and Spaces become configuration tools on top of what core already offers.

There's still a LOT of work to be done figuring out how it all works, but it should be exciting. :-)