Drupal 7 Installation Profiles - Daily Dose of Drupal episode 118

You may have heard of a Drupal installation profile but are not sure what a Drupal installation profile is or how you can write your own Drupal installation profile. This video will walk you through Drupal 7 installation profile basics, and also show you some examples of how installation profiles are developed. This episode is meant to be a getting started guide for those developers or site builders that want to get a basic grasp on Drupal installation profiles and how they can be used to build flexible and dynamic Drupal distributions.

Links:

[codekaratetutorials]

Yes you need to download and include modules and yes you could get an out of date module when you install the site. However this is all solved with Drush Make files. Drush Make uses Drush to automatically download all the correct versions of modules and build out the platform. In your Drush make file you can specify a specific module version or tell it to download the newest version. It brings the entire process of installation profiles together. I will try to do a video on it soon.

[codekaratetutorials]

Drush make is simply for downloading and setting up the Drupal platform (i.e. download core, modules, and themes). If you want to change things in the database (site name, etc). This can all be handled inside the installation profile. In fact I believe in the video above I show how the minimal installation profile sets the site name to the name of the server.

[renegaed]

Thanks I was checking out drush make files recently and it seems like a better alternative to my bash script that I use. Could you mention in your video if it's possible to pass in variables such as site name and database name and have the drush make file set these details during site installation. much appreciated.

[renegaed]

Thanks I meant handing in custom variables through the command line like I am currently doing with my own bash script file.

[renegaed]

Does this mean that i already need to download and include any modules that are dependencies. Does this mean that if i install a site using this method then my modules could be out of date. Seems like a step backwards compared to drush which is able to fetch the latest modules as needed.