I'm attempting to grasp the OA/Panopoly architecture so that I can be aware of overriding code and using Features Override to manage it, but it's turning into a quagmire because so much is already overridden out of the box for unknown reasons.

I can't find anywhere that describes the "needs review" label that appears occasionally in the Features UI - not even sure which module is responsible for it, Features or Features Override. Why does that show up and how is it different than just stating it's overridden? Just as an aside, I've always wished you could hover over a section and you could see which module is responsible for it.

At admin/structure/features, the following modules are overridden (again, this is a virgin Pantheon setup):

Archive, Config, Discussion, Events, Event Imports, Media, Messages, Panopoly Users, Permissions, Sections, Subgroup Intergration (sic - note sp. error) for Spaces, Teams, Wiki, Work Tracker.

As an example, within the Discussion Feature, Field Instances and OG Permissions are overridden.
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I was looking at the node edit form section of Page Manager and noticed that all of the OA pages are overridden. (/admin/structure/pages/edit/node_edit)

Any of the variants, Space, Team, Wiki, etc are all listed as overridden but attempting to drill down doesn't give a clue as to why. I can't find them as features either, nor can I find where the code lives.
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I have a lot of experience on D6 but little on D7 and at first it seemed like distributions made a lot of sense until I realized the pitfalls and limitations of using Features. It's beginning to look like a maintenance nightmare and more trouble than it's worth, though I hope I'm wrong and there's something I'm just not understanding yet, or these are just bugs.

Tnx,

Jeff

Comments

dsnopek’s picture

dsnopek
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Category: Support request » Bug report

This is something that Scott Alan Henry (community contributor to Open Atrium) put a TON of effort into in the 2.15 version and Mike Potter and myself attempted to help with as much as we could. :-)

However, we didn't get it completely fixed for 2.15 and Scott's still working hard on it! If you want to help with that effort, I'd recommend contacting him. We also have tended to discuss the technical issues with it on IRC in the #open_atrium channel.

Anyway, there's a couple of hairy issues that are making this difficult - I'll go over some of the big ones:

  • Media is overridden due to bug in the upstream module that make it difficult (or in some cases impossible) to put it's configuration in features. Here is the relavent bug in the Panopoly issue queue: https://drupal.org/node/2159149
  • panopoly_users, oa_panopoly_users and oa_worktracker are all overridden for the same reason: they are trying to mess with the same panel. Scott has worked on some fixes for Features and Features Override to get this working, however, it may end up requiring changes to Panels internal data structure - it simply isn't Features friendly

I haven't done a fresh install in a while, but I don't remember the others you mentioned being overridden on install.. Or maybe I did drush fra -y and it fixed some of them?

In any case, this is a work in progress! We've fixed most of the easy cases and now we're down to the difficult ones. :-)

Thanks for creating this issue so we have somewhere to track this work!

jkingsnorth’s picture

jkingsnorth commented
Title: Many features overriden out of the box » Features overridden in fresh install
Version: 7.x-2.15 » 7.x-2.19

I've just done a fresh install to check the status of this, and the following features are overridden out of the box in 2.19.

The following features all have overridden 'Field instances' out of the box, with the changes all relating to 'manualcrop' settings (this probably isn't really a problem though):
OA Appearance
OA Core
OA Discussion
OA Events
OA Wiki
OA Worktracker (+see below)
Panopoly Core

There's also:
Command Buttons > Field base is overridden

Other than that it's still just the problematic modules mentioned in #1:
OA Media
Panopoly Users
OA Panopoly Users
OA Worktracker

dsnopek’s picture

dsnopek
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A lot of this is already fixed in the current -dev version of Open Atrium and will be released with Open Atrium 2.20!

I don't know exactly what will remain, but all of the "overridden after fresh install" stuff has finally been fixed in newer versions of Panopoly, which OA 2.20 will be upgrading to, and I know that Mike Potter has done work on other overridden stuff.

The one thing that I think is likely to remain is the panopoly_users, oa_panopoly_users and oa_worktracker issue. That's a complex interaction between Panels and Features Override that will need to be fixed somewhere upstream (probably in Features Override).

jkingsnorth’s picture

jkingsnorth commented

Great news, thanks dsnopek

mpotter’s picture

mpotter commented
Status: Active » Fixed

In v2.21 the only features that should show as overridden are "Panopoly Users" and "Open Atrium Panopoly Users". This is due to a problem with how Features Override handles Panelizer and will be a complex issue to fix.

Going to mark this as fixed since this isn't an issue we can do anything else about in OA itself. Thanks to everyone who worked hard to get the OA-specific stuff all in the non-override status (and to Panopoly for it's fixes!)

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.