I recently gave a presentation on Install Profiles in Drupal 6 and 7 at the Broward County Drupal Users Group. I use Install Profiles in conjunction with Drush Make in order to speed up development times, and automate as much repeatable steps as we can so we can focus on the custom work each website needs.

There are many steps that need to be repeated for a base Drupal install that can be solved by using Install Profiles, but most people have not bothered to create their own. They're actually quite simple to make. This presentation is a brief introduction into the anatomy of a Drupal Install Profile, the differences between 6 and 7, and a couple of basic code examples to get people started.

I noticed the other day that my account on Drupal.org is coming up to its three year anniversary, which means I've probably been working with Drupal for four years now. So I took a look back at some of the old Drupal sites I had put together, and like most developers, almost cringed at what I had done to some of those sites. So, with nearly four years under my belt, these are five things I wish I had been doing in 2005, when I started.

Everything Goes in the Sites Folder.... Everything

Those /modules and /themes folder in the root directory are so tempting. They're clear as day, and it makes perfect sense to just put the modules and themes in those folders. That's what they're there for, right? Wait, you're telling me that instead of using those perfectly good folders, I'm supposed to make a /themes and a /modules folder inside /sites/all, or /sites/default, or /sites/example.com?