Drupal 8 Configuration Management

Drupal 8 comes with a host of great features. One such feature is Configuration Management. According to a survey conducted here, Configuration Management is the MOST anticipated feature in Drupal 8. Now that we have our first official release of Drupal8, the need to learn this fundamental part of the D8 ecosystem is more pressing.

Configuration Management is an essential operation when building and managing drupal sites, especially when building and maintaining large enterprise sites, an experienced Drupal developer could attest this fact. This problem was solved with some hiccups in Drupal 7 by the Features module, but Drupal 8 has a more powerful and stable configuration management system and we should make full use of it. 

In Simple terms, What is Configuration Management?

Configuration Management is simply a process of managing configuration changes of a site across various environments.

What is this session about?

This session would first shed some light on the need for Configuration Management. We will then move on the basics of Configuration Management and how to use and interact with it. Finally, we'll give you a short demonstration on how to manage and track configuration across a development environment which has multiple instances, a development environment like Pantheon or Acquia.

This session is primarily for Drupal Developers who want to learn how to manage configurations across multiple instances of their Drupal 8 sites, but site builders can also benefit from this session

In a nutshell, you'll learn:

1. How to use Drupal's Configuration system to effectively manage configuration changes between various instances of a site.
2. File-based vs Database-based storage of configuration.
3. Types of configuration in Drupal 8: Simple Configuration and Configuration entities.
4. How to manage content like Nodes, Taxonomy terms across various instances.
5. A sample workflow that we use for managing configuration for production sites in an environment like Acquia or Pantheon.
6. What about Features? Is it still required?