Drupal comes out of the box with hundreds of modules lovely crafted by a passionate open source community. This is the true richness of the Drupal world.

On the other hand, the complexity of the re-combination and re-configuration of such modules into a coherent web application has now become the real bottleneck.

Patterns 7.x aims at bypassing this bottleneck by managing and automating site configuration with simple text files, that are easy to read, modify, manage, and share, and that can be executed manually or as a part of an automated web site deployment.

Patterns 7.x offers a unique framework to share configuration efforts among Drupal developers: a dedicated API, extensive web documentation, automatic extraction of the configuration of the web site are just some of the staple features of the module. Furthermore, the possibility to write custom Patterns parsers could even guarantee interoperability between Drupal and other CMSs.

The purpose of this BoF is to share experiences about web site deployment, learning the strength and weakness of Patterns, and compare them with other deployment modules, e.g. Features.

Everybody that is curious or interested in knowing more about Patterns is very welcome!