DrupalCon Austin 2014: INTRODUCTION TO PANOPOLY AND DRUPAL DISTRIBUTIONS
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 2014-06-04

Speakers: dsnopek
When you first install Drupal, it's a blank slate - it doesn't really do anything yet. If you want a personal blog, company website, intranet portal or e-commerce store - you need to start installing modules and actually configuring your website into one of those things.

That's where Drupal distributions come in! A Drupal distribution is Drupal plus some modules, themes and configuration, so that when you first install it does something right out of the box.

In this presentation, David Snopek (one of the Panopoly co-maintainers) is going to talk about (and demonstrate!) a Drupal distribution called Panopoly. Panopoly has many great features for site builders and users right out of the box:

- In-place page building
- Responsive layouts
- WYSIWYG
- Media support
- Improved admin experience
- Improved content editing experience
- Awesome reusable widgets
- ... and more MAGIC!

Panopoly allows you start building your website from the 10th floor, rather than the ground up!

We'll also touch on one of the more advanced uses of Panopoly: building your own distribution on top of it! If you find yourself building several similar sites, you may want to consider creating your own distribution so you don't have to do the same configuration over and over again. While building a new distribution from scratch can be challenging, Panopoly can serve as a "base distribution" and handle much of the heavy lifting for you.