Sample install profile: basic.profile

Hope everyone is enjoying 6th birthday/5.0 release day. I've been tinkering with install profiles, and have a working one in our public SVN. See https://svn.bryght.com/dev/browser/bryghtbase/DRUPAL-5/trunk/profiles/basic

If you've got control over your server space, you can actually check out the entire trunk (replace "browser" with "svn" to get the checkout URL -- e.g. https://svn.bryght.com/dev/svn/bryghtbase/DRUPAL-5/trunk/) and get all the supporting modules and a DRUPAL-5-0 install.

I've really been enjoying creating install profiles. There is lots more work to be done to really tune and smooth the edges of an install profile....but this is really just like developing a full Drupal site for a specific purpose.

My main points / tips are:

• it's really easy to create install profiles -- you don't need to be a super developer
• look through your "variables" table in a running install -- from the profile I made, you can see that a simple variable_set can set most things
• copy/paste/edit works -- start with default.profile or the profile I've made, and edit things
• get a process down for setting up / wiping / testing your environment -- this usually means command line tools

On that last point, it's fairly simple once you get the hang of it to go "mysqladmin create basic" (test test test) "mysql drop basic / mysql create basic" and keep working the same database. Also, you need to "reset" your settings.php each time...I usually delete my entire directory and make a fresh one by copying the _template file -- e.g. "cp -R _template/ example.com/", where example.com is the address where you are testing.