Posted by mlncn on April 29, 2007 at 10:09pm
I know I should do more reading and trying before asking, but are partial install profiles possible? Can (parts of) install profiles be used after a site is already up and running? Should this use of canned configuration be tried?
To take an easier-seeming and probably useful case, how difficult would it be to adapt the profile mechanism and a profile itself in order to make adding wiki functionality to a site a matter of a few steps.
I'm pretty sure the code can be adapted, in theory anyhow, so I'm looking for feedback on the desirability as much as the feasibility of just the bare beginnings of mix-and-match easy-bake site recipes.
Thanks for humoring me!
Comments
Mostly yes. The code inside
Mostly yes. The code inside the hook_profile_final should run anywhere anytime for example, and that's most of the work.
Yes
...and no. Most install profiles are written to expect a "clean slate". If you don't mind settings just being set, then theoretically you could make a sort of "profile installer" that ran install profiles.
More checks would be needed in the install profile itself, or perhaps some confirmation dialogues to see if the user didn't want to overwrite settings.
That being said, as I've now taken a crack at a couple of install profiles, there are other layers of abstraction I want. i.e. I don't want to just copy/paste my TinyMCE settings each time (for example), but want to use them across install profiles. How best to re-use these? Chunk out the code into separate files and include them instead? Starts getting tricky...
Check out Drupal scripting automation
Sympal Scripts[1] and drush[2] are two projects that let you script Drupal operations from the command line. You'll need a shell and execute privileges, but you could make a library of scripts for automating common tasks that could be run any time you want.
[1] http://drupal.org/project/sympal_scripts
[2] http://www.drupal.org/drush