Webforms in Drupal 8 are configuration entities, which means that they are exportable to YAML files and this makes it easy to transfer a webform from one server environment to another. Generally, anything that defines functionality or behavior in Drupal 8 is stored as simple configuration or a configuration entity. For example, fields, views, and roles are stored as configuration entities. Things that are considered ‘content’ are stored in the database as content entities. Content entities include nodes, comments, taxonomy terms, users, and also webform submissions.

Managing Configuration

The core concept behind Drupal’s configuration management is you can export and import how a website is configured (aka how it works) from one environment to another environment. For example, we might want to copy the configuration from your staging server to your production server. Drupal 8 has initially taken the approach that all configuration from one environment needs to be moved to the new environment. The problem is that…

In the case of webforms and blocks, this is a major issue because site builders are continually updating these config entities on a production website. The Drupal community is aware of this problem – they have provided some solutions and are actively working to fix this challenge/issue in a future release of Drupal.

Improving Configuration Management

Dries Buytaert shared how we are improving Drupal’s configuration management system and he notes that the currently recommended solutions are the Config Filter, Configuration Split, and Config Ignore modules.

Below is a summary…Read More