Kraftwagen is a Drush extension and a set of Drupal modules that enables web-development best practices for Drupal projects.

One of Drupal’s core values is “easy to use”. Yet what that means to end-users (who use FTP to upload Drupal to a web host, and customise it through the admin interface), is different from what that means to developers (who customise Drupal extensively, need staged deployments and use version control systems to collaborate). Kraftwagen makes Drupal fit for serious web-development.

After using other means of web-development (like: Symfony2 and Ruby on Rails), we missed the following when coming back to Drupal-based web-development:

• Reliable, single command deployments (to multiple deploy targets). No more manual Feature reverts!
• Storing configuration as code, in version control; instead of in the database.
• Referring to 3rd party code (Drupal core, contrib modules and external libraries) instead of checking them into version control.

To accomplish the points mentioned above with Drupal can be hard. With Kraftwagen we have created a way of using Drupal that facilitates these best practices. It is open source, obviously, and reuses existing work where possible (for example: install profiles, Drush Make, Features, version control systems and Capistrano).

In this talk we will:

• Share how we use Kraftwagen, how it has improved the quality of our work, and how we sell it to our customers.
• Explain the structure of a Drupal project with Kraftwagen, demonstrate setting up a new project, and adding some modules and custom functionality to it.

For more information about Kraftwagen, see: kraftwagen.org.