Last week was the virtual DrupalCon Europe and I had the pleasure to present CMI 2 updates together with Moshe Weitzman. Attached to this post are the slides.

It was a strange DrupalCon, no travelling and home made food and good coffee are of course a nice change but I am not sure it makes up for not meeting Drupal friends in person. I enjoyed the hallway track and visited the "virtual booth" of sponsors and it was a nice way to randomly meet people like one would at a in-person event. But presenting a presentation to just the screen without seeing the audience was a new experience.

I presented the CMI updates under the overarching goal of standardising the way configuration management is approached in Drupal. After the big API addition last year we focused on updating contrib to use this new API. A particular highlight is the testing framework for modules upgrading from config filter to the new core API.

Another highlight is of course the new drush deploy command which Moshe presented. It executes the steps to update a drupal site where new code has been pulled. In particular it executes a database update, config import and running of deploy hooks.

Deploy hooks are the same as post_update hooks, but they are meant to be run after the configuration is imported. But instead of putting them in your mymodule.post_update.php you put the code in mymodule.deploy.php. They are not meant for contrib modules, but rather for custom code that a site relies on. For example it allows you to add content to fields that you created via config. More information can be found in the deploy hook documentation

Lastly I attended a very interesting BOF around distributions. I did not initiate it but I was very happy to observe the exchange of ideas and approaches between maintainers of different distributions. I hope more collaboration will happen next year in this space and hopefully more distributions join forces to find a way core can assist the development of distributions.