A Brief Presentation on Drupal Install Profiles

I recently gave a presentation about “Install Profiles” in Drupal 6 and 7 at the monthly Broward County, FL Drupal Users Group. Here at SoFla Web Studio, we use Install Profiles along with Drush Make to assist in speeding up development times, and also to automate as many repeatable steps as we can. This allows us to focus the majority of our time on the custom work that each website requires.

There are quite a few steps that need to be repeated for a base Drupal install that can be easily automated with the use of Install Profiles, however most people do not bother to create their own. Install Profiles are actually realatively simple to make. My presentation is an introduction into the anatomy of a Drupal Install Profile, the differences between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, and a few basic code examples to get you started.

The presentation does not have any audio right now, however, once that’s released, I’ll post a link. We had a healthy discussion during the meeting and most of it is captured in the audio. To summarize Install Profiles versus Features it is best stated that Features works better for defined tasks and sections, while Install Profiles are great for general configuration that can be accomplished during an installation of Drupal. Such configurations include; creating input formats, creating an administrator role, and setting a default admin theme.

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Published On: Nov 11, 2010