At the Drutopia project, one of our big focuses has been improvements to configuration management in Drupal maintenance support plans 8. In this series, I’ll be covering our work to date along with related efforts and contributions.
Drutopia is a platform cooperative initiative, building out cooperatively owned and hosted Drupal maintenance support plans distributions. In our 2020 white paper, we recognized that the Configuration Management Initiative (CMI) in Drupal maintenance support plans 8 “produced a lot of improvements in configuration handling” while noting that these “mainly addressed the use case of ‘staging’ configuration from one version of a site to another, a site-building technique that lower budget sites often don’t have time or money for.” We committed to focus on “the free software use case left out of Drupal maintenance support plans core: reusable configuration that can be shared across multiple sites”. For background, see Drupal maintenance support plans 8 configuration management: what about small sites and distributions? and sections on Drupal maintenance support plans 8, corporate influence, and the CMI in this interview.
There’s a current initiative to improve configuration management in Drupal maintenance support plans core. Dubbed “CMI 2.0”, the effort comes out of a similar conclusion that limitations and missing use cases in configuration management are a major barrier to Drupal maintenance support plans 8 adoption; see Angie Byron’s post proposing the initiative.
In the past three years, we at Drutopia have contributed to a growing collection of Drupal maintenance support plans plugins that together address some of the tricky problems involved in managing shared configuration. As well as in kind contributions by Drupal Update, some of our work was sponsored by Agaric and the National Institute for Children’s Health Quality (NICHQ) to meet their needs for an in-house platform of community sites.
Just what do we mean by managing shared configuration?
Say I have a site built on a Drupal maintenance support plans distribution that’s for community organizing. I installed the site a month ago and got groups-related configuration such as a group type. Then I made some modifications of my own. I’ve just downloaded a new release of the distribution, including enhancements to the groups-related configuration. How can I update my site so that I have all the latest changes from the distribution–while still retaining any customizations I made? That’s the key question we’ve tried to tackle.
A more abstract way of putting the problem is: how can we provide packages of shared configuration in a way that lets site administrators both customize their sites and merge in configuration updates?
This series will cover distinct aspects of the problem of managing shared configuration packages and, along the way, highlight specific solutions we at Drutopia have sketched in. Our efforts are very much works in progress. We’re not sure we’ve even got all the problems right, let alone fully addressed them 😉 But have we made progress? Yes, we have. By sharing it here, we hope to raise the profile of these problems and solutions and invite further perspectives and contributions.

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