The terms "installation profile," and "distribution," are common terms amongst the Drupal community. We take a look at what these actual terms mean and how you can get the most out of Drupal for your next project.
Installation Profiles
Drupal defines installation profiles as a profile which combines and provides site features and functions for a specific type of site. In simpler terms what you get out of installation profiles would include Drupal core, Content Management System engine, contributed modules, themes, and pre-defined configuration. Contributed modules are seen as add-ons outside of Drupal core. Contributed modules consist of modules such as Views & CCK (CCK is now in core as of Drupal 7).
The overall purpose of Installation profiles is to help developers set up a complex site in the least amount of time. For example, an installation profile for a newspaper website might have modules for user registration, advance RSS feed aggregation, creation of roles (editor, writer, manager) & a WYSIWYG text editor.
Installation profiles are also useful because they can pre-configure Drupal in a way that is different than the default – a process that could take some time to do manually. Installation profiles can set up vocabularies and fill them with terms, add and configure your basic content types, create user roles, and fill in their permissions.
In other words, they make it more efficient to set up sites for specific use cases. For example, you could build an installation profile for blog sites that would set up a "blog" content type, add a "creator" role, and give that role permission to add, edit, and delete blog posts. Installation profiles take the form of a ".profile" file which goes in the folder "profiles." When running the installation script, you will have the option to choose which profile you would like to run. Because profiles only run once during installation, you cannot switch profiles once you are finished installing.
Some useful installation profiles that are worth examining are:
Drupal Developer - Useful collection of modules to for Drupal developers.
The Base Installation Profile - For those who constantly download CCK, Views, Image API this installation profile is for you. Also recommended for those that are not to familiar with Drupal.
Distributions
Distributions are installation profiles with additional features. In other words, the term "distribution" refers to an installation profile and everything else that profile needs to work. You can either think of an installation profile as being one component of a distribution (just the .profile file), or you can think of a distribution as the subset of installation profiles that includes extra modules, themes and functions.
Distributions are even more helpful than standard installation profiles because they remove the stage in every Drupal project of having to sift through the thousands of available modules to decide which ones are most appropriate for your site. A distribution could make building an image gallery site much easier, for example, because it could choose and set up the best image gallery solution for your site. The overall consensus about Drupal Distributions is that it makes developing and deploying a Drupal-centric site easier out-of-the-box.
The installation process for distributions is similar to installing profiles. The basics: upload the whole distribution directory into your "profiles" directory before installing Drupal, and then choose to run that distribution’s installation profile during the installation script.
Useful Distributions Worth Examining:
OpenAtrium - OpenAtrium is an intranet that facilitates project management.
OpenPublish - OpenPublish is an online news platform that emphasizes visitor engagement and ease of content creation.
Managing News - Tracks news through RSS feeds and displays where each event is happening on a map.
Aegir - Aegir is a tool that makes it easier to maintain and deploy a large number of websites.
