Drupal Distributions: Speeding up site deployment

Last Thursday I presented Drupal Distributions: Speeding up site deployment for the DrupalACT March meet up.

A new lunchtime format allowed for a different audience to attend and I'm grateful to those who took the time out of their work day to show their support!

The format of the presentation was a brief introduction to the three key substituents I use to create distributions:

• Features
• Profiler Builder
• Drush Make

There's a small issue in Profiler Builder that is currently being addressed. If a profile is created using Profiler Builder without the Profiler library and Libraries API the subsequent installation will fail with a WSOD unless

!function_exists('profiler_v2') ? require_once('libraries/profiler/profiler.inc') : FALSE; profiler_v2('profile name');

is removed from the profile.install file.

I've included the files I used in the live demonstration so people may test the creation of distributions and usage of drush make themselves. The simplest method is to download drush.make.txt to a suitable location and then run:

drush make drush.make.txt <install location>

Navigate to the install location in your browser and install the distribution!

I've attached a PDF copy of the presentation to this post, as well as the google presentation and comments regarding it are more than welcome here!