This is the eighth and last installment in a series presenting work on shared configuration that comes out of the Drutopia initiative and related efforts. If you’ve stuck with it this far, wow! If you haven’t seen previous installments, you might want to start with Part 1, Configuration Providers.

The series focus has been meeting the needs of distributions for creating and updating packages of shared configuration, a use case not addressed in Drupal 8 core.

We’ve seen how configuration can be packaged using the Features module (Part 6). We’ve covered the ins and outs of updating packages of configuration, including how to assemble configuration as provided by extensions (Part 1), make needed changes to configuration from another package (Part 4), capture a previous configuration state (Part 2), and merge in configuration updates (Part 5). Along the way we’ve examined the particular cases of preserving configuration customizations (Part 3), working with core configuration required by multiple features (Part 7), and (bonus!) managing blocks when subthemes are in the mix.

The fact we’re on installment eight – not even including the sneak bonus episode – in itself suggests a general conclusion: addressing these needs is not simple!