Tag clould Managing per Project Installation Profiles Unbeknown to many users, installation profiles are what is used to install a Drupal site. The two profiles that ship with core are standard and minimal. Standard gives new users a basic, functional Drupal site. Minimal provides a very minimal configuration so developers and site builders can start building a new site. A key piece of a Drupal distro is an installation profile. I beleive that developers and more experienced site builders should be using installation profiles as part of their client sites builds. In Drupal 7 an installation profile is treated like a special module, so it can implement hooks - including hook_update_N(). This means that the installation profile is the best place for controlling turning modules on and off, switching themes or any other site wide configuration changes that can't be handled by features or a module specific update hook. In an ideal world you could have 1 installation profile that is used for all of your projects and you just include it in your base build. Unfortunately installation profiles tend to evolve into being very project specific. At the same time you are likely to want a common starting point. I like to give my installation profiles unique names, rather than something generic like "my_profile", I prefer to use "[client_prefix]_profile". I'll cover project prefixes in another blog post. After some trial and error, I've settled on a solution which I think works for having a common starting point for an