Let's face it the Drupal system is complex in nature. Everything from nodes, to content all live in the database and handling such may seem like a nightmare even for the more experienced Drupal user.
Many of us have posed the question as to why we need to enabled and download the same module over and over to achieve similar results. How do we speed this process up? The goal of the features module is to satisfy this specfic use case.
What is it?
The module description has features as a “module is like any other Drupal module except that it declares its components (e.g. views, contexts, CCK fields, etc.) in its .info file so that it can be checked, updated, or reverted programmatically.”
In simpler terms the feature module is a collection of Drupal entities bundled together to satisfy a certain use-case, for example a blog or an image gallery.
The idea is to make syncing of different sites as effective and efficicent as possible. For example: if someone were to ask how would they set up a blog. You as the Drupal experts would bring with a laundry list of modules to install to actually have a functional blog.
However, the purpose of the features module is to provide a shortcut to configuring a Drupal site out of the box. The purpose of the feature module is to deploy all configurations and modules necessary for someone looking to deploy a blog or even an image gallery with the right configuration thus reducing development tweeks with actual usability.
Why Should I Use it?
- Ease of use. Greatly reduces the amount of time to download and configure a Drupal base site.
- Ability to reuse configurations.
- Exportables. Features can be used with a version control like SVN or GIT
- Task origented projects
- Compatibility with popular drupal modules (http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/11478)
- Saves time on development
Benifits of Features
- Saves things to a module instead of a database
- Easy to move site configuartions between databases
- Avoid misktakes like updating database
- Reduces the chances of losing data.
- The future module writes the php code for us in a module format further reducing developement time.