DrupalCon Barcelona 2015: What we learned from building an (extensible) distribution

Building a distribution is an awesome way to create software that runs out of the box with many more features than Drupal itself. We use distributions to look at best practices, to start new projects and to build platforms and kickstart-solutions for other projects. After developing ERPAL for service providers we realized there are some challenges, when trying to customize the distribution, that we didn't consider before. So for ERPAL platform we went the extra mile to ensure flexibility and extensibility, creating a distribution that serves as a platform and is easy to customize for the user's specific needs.

I will cover tools like

Distribution profiles and makefiles

Other distributions that we used and evaluated in the past

Features

Features override

Features Tools

Default config

And our contribution Unlink default configurations

For each I will give an overview of how it's supposed to work and how it helped us in building distributions. But I will also showcase in which use cases they seem to be perfect but are not and how these problems can be avoided.