Drupal Installation Profiles

Drupal Installation Profiles give developers a way to pre-package Drupal sites for mass distribution. Installation profiles are available that let you launch a full-featured community in a matter of minutes.

One of the currently available profiles lays the foundation for an eCommerce site with a few mouse clicks; another gets you up and running with a top-of-the line news site before you can say, "stop the presses."

Installing via an Installation Profile is also a great way to see how other developers are building (and theming) complex solutions using Drupal.

A great way to learn Drupal is to install a distribution and then take a peek at the list of enabled modules and the contents of the sites/default/themes directory. It's fun to look for modules that are unfamiliar, or are being used in new or interesting ways.

Drupal 7

Here's a list of Drupal 7 installation profiles we found on Drupal.org (sorted by Most Installed). See also: http://drupal.org/project/distributions

Commerce Kickstart - http://drupal.org/project/commerce_kickstart
Localized Drupal Distribution - http://drupal.org/project/l10n_install
Demonstration Site Install Profile - http://drupal.org/project/demo_profile
Drupal for Churches - http://drupal.org/project/churches
Media Development Profile - http://drupal.org/project/media_dev
Display Suite profile - http://drupal.org/project/displaysuite
Feeds Test Site - http://drupal.org/project/feeds_test
Designer Starter Kit - http://drupal.org/project/dsk
Drupal with Admin Menu - http://drupal.org/project/admin_menu_profile
Omega Install Profile - http://drupal.org/project/omega_profile
GrandFoo Install Profile - http://drupal.org/project/grandfoo_profile
eRecruiter - http://drupal.org/project/recruiter
Commerce Downloads - http://drupal.org/project/commerce_downloadsins

Drupal 6

If you haven't made the jump to Drupal 7 yet, there are some very cool distributions available for D6 also. As of this writing, there were 53 installation profiles for D6 at http://drupal.org/project/installation%2Bprofiles

Here are a few more profiles that aren't listed on Drupal.org:

Acquia Commons - http://network.acquia.com/downloads/drupal-commons
Conference Organizating Distribution (COD) http://usecod.com/
Open Atrium - http://openatrium.com/
OpenPublish - http://openpublishapp.com/

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Drupal Mobile Website Development Book Available

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This article is a review of James Pearce's new book, "Professional Mobile Web Development with WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal", published by Wrox. Even though the book is CMS-neutral among those three leading CMSs, my article looks at it from the perspective of Drupal. I provide a synopsis and overview of the book as a whole, and also focus on the two Drupal-specific chapters, to give the reader a sense of the suitability of the technical information and recommendations as resources for Drupal developers and themers who wish to create mobile-ready websites.

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About the author:

Kevin Millecam

Kevin has been involved in web communities since the early 1990s when he managed parts of Novell's Cool Solutions for GroupWise community. He's been using Drupal almost as long. Kevin is currently a parter at WebWise Solutions and continues to ride the "Social Business Software" wave with clients like Symantec, Blue Coat, and Omniture.