Yet another key component to the Drupal Platform is the install profile and it's another one that deserves a few posts to cover it adequately. The goal of this series of posts will be to build an install profile capable of creating a basic brochure-style website - more or less what WordPress's core functionality offers (ok, we'll be doing a bit less for this example ;-)).

Drupal 7 install profiles differ quite significantly from Drupal 6 install profiles so a lot of the material covered here won't necessarily apply if you're working on D6 only. There's already a lot of great documentation to help get you started. Drupal.org has an overview of install profiles that's worth taking a read through, for example. The Drupal documentation also covers all of the common hooks that you may want to use in your profile. But the best place, without question, is just reading through the Drupal core profile code (no, I'm not joking). Check out profiles/minimal, and profiles/standard folders that come with Drupal, particularly the .info, .profile, and the .install files.

In the previous two posts (Features Part 1: A Simple Feature and Features Part 2: Managing Your Feature) I demonstrated how to build a simple feature. The result is something that's particularly useful for two things:

1. A starting point for new site builds
2. Dev -> Stage -> Prod style of workflow for site building

If all you want to use features for is the second option, then this is perfectly acceptable. But when you start re-using features across multiple sites, you'll end up needing to fork the feature across each new site build. While you'll no longer have the overhead of creating a blog feature when doing a new site build, you may wish to add new components to your blog feature at some point. How to you push the updated feature across all sites if you've already forked the feature to accommodate necessary customizations?

I first heard about features at DrupalCon DC and while it seemed like a nice idea, I couldn't really see how it could be practical to someone who can already write their own modules. Of course, I thought exactly the same of views when I first learned of it too.

If you build Drupal sites and you've never built a feature before, it's about time you gave it a go! This post will walk you through what a feature is and how to go about building one. In a later post I'll show you how to make your feature re-usable and why it's important.

We arrived in Thailand safe and sound almost exactly three weeks ago. Amazing how time flies! We spent our first week in Bangkok shopping for clothes (since we brought almost nothing here) and seeing parts of the city that we hadn't explored last time we were here. Bangkok is really an amazing city, insanely busy, with delicious street food everywhere, and amazing (and quite clean) public transport.

I've never been very skilled at learning languages (well, non-computer languages). I "studied" French for seven years in elementary and high school, the end of which I had memorized a few words for different types of clothes and body parts, how to conjugate verbs, and how to ask to go to the toilet, s'il vous plait. After seven years I don't think I could speak a complete sentence. In elementary school I was "diagnosed" with having some kind of auditory processing problems which means that it supposedly takes my brain longer to turn raw sounds into meaning. In grade 5 I even got a detention for not being able to respond to a phrase from my teacher that I really should have known (I actually did know the answer, I was just too afraid to speak). But it was about this time that I completely gave up all hope of ever being able to learn a new language.

As I climbed into the minivan I started to think that perhaps I should've taken Rok's advice and written "no kidney" across my stomach. I had all my things with me, so at least in the worst case I could easily grab it and make a run for it if things came to that. My stereotypes of eastern europeans (or at least people that speak an eastern european / russian sounding language) have long been ingrained in my mind from countless James Bond and other spy movies. They all must be somehow involved with either drug or people trafficking, and probably pack at least one hand gun too, right? Well, these were the thoughts that lasted for but a moment on my "bus" from Venice into Ljubjana, Slovenia until I realized just how friendly everyone was, regardless of the fact that I couldn't speak a word of Slovenian and they could only speak a few of English.