Fingerprint module and server - bringing settings dumps to Drupal
Fingerprint is part of ModuleCraft. A project we started to raise awareness and funds for a set of awesome Drupal tools for the community. If you haven't heard about it go check it out.
To show you that we have the determination and the knowledge to go trough with all our promises, we already started developing some of the tools. The first wave was the Cardgame, and now here's the second:
For some time now we have the ability to represent some of Drupal's settings in code with Features. As time goes by, more and more modules integrate the necessary hooks and get all the advantages of being exportable.
We saw in this the ideal tool to make a configuration dump for Drupal, a bit like the crash report with all the settings that you can get from most desktop software. But fingerprint is more than that: it exports all the settings in a searchable and easily readable format: XML.
This format is not for importing or backuping, but it gives you the ability to search similarities and differences in two Drupal site, to find bugs, best practices or changes that happened to your site.
The system is flexible, so XML is just the first export format that had been implemented, one crazy idea we have is to store it in a Non-relational database for easy searching and analysis.
We've set up a free public fingerprint server for the community of which the basic functionality is and will remain free for all to use (e.g. fingerprint uploading for bug tracking, or just sharing your configuration with the community). Later we'll be adding private fingerprints to our server as a premium feature (that won't be free since these fingerprints will not be benefiting the community). You can get your hands already now on a premium subscription if you donate to the documentation+ fundraising round at modulecraft.com (that's the premium service you get no matter how much you donate for the documentation+ fundraising round).
We have a lot of good ideas for this project, and I'm sure you have too. So help us decide the future of this project by voting and contributing your ideas at the ModuleCraft Fingerprint page. Or download a copy at Drupal.org.
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I'm partly getting it, but not totally: so, this fingerprint is an export only format for configuration. Fine. But what does the server do? Does it just store uploaded fingerprints? Or does it also have tools to diff/analyze them?
Right now it only works as a sort of pastebin for Drupal site configurations.
The goals of the fundraising is to develop the tools to analyze properly.