Over the last month we’ve done a series of blogposts and screencasts that convey an approach to speeding up site building using Context and Spaces to create reusable Drupal ‘features’.

We’ve talked about how to build features. We’ve also talked about how to export those features and use them in your own custom modules.

Now let’s look at how to integrate your features with Organic Groups and some of the per-group customization this offers. In today’s screencast we’ll talk about:

• Space types beyond “site-wide” spaces
• Using Context UI to allow your feature to interact with multiple space-types
• The Views filters provided by Spaces that give you control over how your features behave both in and out of the spaces you put them in

If you haven’t watched the first and second screencasts in this series, I’d recommend checking them out first as we’ll build on some concepts discussed in those videos.

Earlier this week, Young showed off some of the efficiency wins we got out of using Context and Spaces to cut down on repetitive tasks during site builds. We’ll be running a series of posts over the next month that show how we got there. The first, a screencast on the basics of feature building with Context and Spaces, is below.

This is a follow along demo, all you need is:

• Drupal 6
• Spaces module
• Context module
• Views module

For more resources on feature-building with context and spaces, check out the Spaces Features and Context UI documentation on code.developmentseed.org.

We’ll do a couple more screencasts in February to better show how to build specific features, and up next is how to build a pressroom. Some future posts will also discuss the programmatic definition of Spaces and Contexts, how to use features in your modules, and using Spaces with Organic Groups. Feel free to post requests.

Our redesign of World Resources Institute’s main website just launched and we saved considerable configuration time implementing the design with Context UI. Here are four screenshots to show you how Context UI can take a smart information architecture and simply map it to a Drupal site.

In the first screenshot, you can see the architecture and design we built. In the second screen shot, you see how we mapped our IA to Drupal with context definitions. This is the admin/build/context page, which shows all the “sections” or “features” we defined for this Drupal site. In the third screenshot, you get a sense of the specific definitions on the news page. This shows you the the bundles of views, content types, panels, menu items, and blocks. Lastly on the 4th screenshot, you see how those definitions mapped to the main news page.

Main Page

Last month at DrupalCon Boston I presented with Jeff Miccolis on implementing a formal context system in Drupal. We had a lot of ideas to share and some proof of concept code to demo. Since then we’ve been working hard to clean up our code and our concepts.

The basic idea behind the context module is to allow different parts of the Drupal stack to expose key pieces of logic to other parts in a standardized fashion. Context_ui extends this core functionality by allowing users to create context definitions – bundles of views, content types, panels, menu items, and blocks – that can be used to model “sections” or “features” on your Drupal site, among other things.