Why do we want to manage our configuration?

If you're not a developer, you might wonder what you need Configuration Management for. Up until now, you have probably made any changes right in the live website, which we call the Production website. For example, you might have added a field to a content type or moved a block to a new region. Sometimes, this works fine, sometimes it doesn't. When everything breaks, you may have to import a backup database, if you are lucky enough to have one. In the meantime, any visitors to your site may have seen a broken site and probably declined to come back. In professional web development, it's crucial to not make changes to the production website. Developers don't build new features in the live website but in a local copy of the site. Only when they are satisfied with the result will the changes go live.

We want to make our configuration live as fast as possible. We don't want to have to click our way through everything again...