Installation profiles

Code as ingredients, modules as dishes, sites as meals, installation profile as recipe, and restaurants with a menu as providers of distributions (or SaaS, though she doesn't mention that).

That's the takeaway from today's post by Karen Borchert at Agile Approach.

http://www.agileapproach.com/blog-entry/code-free-explanation-of-drupal-distributions

The first part is provided by the default installation profile:

drupal 7 programmatically create node in installation profile
http://www.group42.ca/creating_and_updating_nodes_programmatically_in_drupal_7

I have spent the day discovering that you cannot populate with content the content type created in a Feature module using the .install file of that Feature module.

Found some great clues in a test

http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules--simpletest--drupal_web_test_case.php/7/source

Putting that to work in our installation profile's .install file, shown beneath a modification of standard.install's role creation to create an additional 'content manager' role and to name the 'administrator' role more appropriately, as 'developer':

So long as the best way to automate the setup of Drupal modules is in another module, we should claim a namespace for that. For modules not spaces and context, that namespace can be install* or install_*

What I most want this for right now is not for deploying a new site but for doing development work on a site. For instance, it would be fantastic to encode all of this setup in a module:

http://zzolo.org/thoughts/api-module

Agaric Design Collective's standard project starter distribution, stored as a git repository from which cloned projects can pull updates (upgraded modules or core and new additions), consists of Drupal 6 core and the following excellent contributed modules drawn from the thousands publicly available on Drupal.org.

There's a hook for that! The logically named hook_requirements lets you set requirements for each module.

To make these requirements apply to an installation profile, simply put your implementation of hook_requirements in the .install file of a module that is required by that installation profile.

Skip down to the resolution for the code that worked– doing it this Drupal way.

Keep reading for the various wrong turns on the path to the right direction.

For the necessary admin_menu module, I prefer the initial settings to not collapse fields on the modules page

With current initial settings this means unchecking "Apply margin-top to page body" and "Collapse fieldsets on modules page." Instead of going through this step every time this should be rolled into Agaric's basic/base installation profile.

Resolution

This came innto my head as a new idea, but I realize that this is just a rehashing of my partial installation profile.

Use case: make the navigation block show up only for logged in users, and expand the create content link.

We at Agaric Design Collective do that all the time, can probably just go in the Agaric Starter Profile, but it'd be nice to do as a module if possible.

Resolution