install profiles

In the last post I demonstrated creating a very basic install profile in Drupal 7. It was more or less a stripped down version of the standard profile with a few very minor additions.

I've been getting some great comments on my posts and one I wanted to note was from @david regarding the Profiler project. I've not had a chance to use it yet but it looks very promising. The profiler module provides an improved API and tools to vastly simplify what's necessary in writing your install profiles. While I would guess some more complex tasks still require you to use the raw Drupal API, this tool looks like it could give you a huge head start.

So, in the previous post, one of the additions I wanted to make but couldn't, was to create the default client user. The client name and email address will obviously differ on all sites we build. For this we need to add a new step in the install process to allow us to configure the client account prior to it's creation. All of the code from here on out will sit in our .profile file (recall that this is equivalent to a .module file, but for install profiles).

This is the second post in my series on install profiles. It covers the anatomy of an install profile and creating .install and .profile files. We create a simple brochure style install profile which is based on the standard D7 profile with a few customizations of my our own.

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.

I believe that this is not an issue with Drupal 7 as it handles variables differently than D5/D6. However, if you want to make an install profiles for anything earlier than D7 static variables can pose a huge problem. Static varibles are used for caching within a function in PHP. Generally the first time the function is called during a page load the static will be set. The second time it's called there's no need to execute most of the code and the value stored in the static will be returned.

While statics can be convenient and help improve performance, they become a huge problem when the relevant data has been altered partway through a page load and you need to reset the cache. Since the install profile is executed in what's effectively a single page load, static variables become problematic.

One of the toughest things for me personally is coming up content for a new website. Specifically things that resemble an "about" page. I find it significantly easier if I'm given a starting point and something to work from. Once I get started I have no problem writing some decent content.

To make things a bit simpler for couples using Wedful wedding websites we decided to create default nodes with example content. This way users aren't given a blank slate when starting out. We've set up eight default pages to give them a bit of a starting point with the content on their site. Each page contains some example text or questions to give the users an idea of what to write.