What if we sped up the development phases of a project with Drupal? To optimize our approach, we have designed a Drupal 10 installation profile based on our know-how and experience. Our clients now benefit from this by default, a fundamental cost-benefit gain that allows us to focus resources on high value-added features.
Our Installation Profile Is Not a Distribution
Let’s start with the basics. A Drupal distribution is a ‘ready-to-use’ package that allows you to quickly set up your web project. In other words, a distribution is a set of pre-assembled components, a sort of extra layer that extends Drupal core’s capabilities to meet your specific needs.
A distribution package includes:
- The core, the Drupal core, which anticipates core modules not to be enabled
- Installation profiles: typical configurations
- One or more themes to customize the interfaces
- Libraries: CSS or Javascript
- A selection of common contributed modules
- Standard configurations (users and roles, standard views, editorial workflow, development tools, etc.)
Several distributions are available in the Drupal community, depending on the type of sites you want to create. In our projects, for example, we have worked with:
- Opigno LMS: an e-learning solution to create learning paths, manage exercises, build communities, and measure results
- Varbase: configurations, features, and essential modules to save you time
- Open Social: to run a corporate social network
Distributions Are Losing Steam
A distribution, like any Drupal site, must be regularly updated to benefit from the latest features and security patches. Ideally, with every new version of the CMS, distribution maintainers should also provide an update.
However, as the update cycle of Drupal 10 speeds up, it is increasingly difficult for maintainers to keep up. While there were more than 300 distributions for Drupal 7, the number of distributions for D9 dropped to 2 and none so far for version 10.
After developing our own distribution for Drupal 7, we chose to be lighter and more agile this time by opting for an installation profile.
The bluedrop.fr Installation Profile (BDFR for Short)
With 20 years of experience working on web projects (intranet, e-commerce, multisite platforms, business applications, information systems, transportation websites, etc.), we have accumulated considerable experience with the base configurations common to all projects. As a result, we created our own Drupal 10 installation profile, thereby providing our clients with the benefit of our experience and expertise by default.
Our installation profile includes a set of modules that we install for all our projects, themes, and the actual installation profile itself. Let’s look closer!
Modules Included in Our Installation Profile
- Themes and modules to improve the user experience in the back office
- The Webform module for creating advanced forms
- Modules needed for creating rich content and landing pages (including layout builder)
- Modules to improve performance, support new image formats and their progressive loading
- Modules to strengthen CMS security
- Other small utility modules that we systematically install first
- All these modules are described in a standard way in the project’s composer.json file
Themes Included in Our Installation Profile
- Our custom theme based on our design system with associated interactive documentation (storybook) and all necessary tooling for asset compilation (JS and CSS files)
- A specific theme for public sites requiring the State’s Design System (DSFR)
- Ultimately, these two themes will become starter kit themes for better integration into the Drupal 10 ecosystem.
The Installation Profile Proper
- Setup of permission and user roles that are simple and tailored to our projects
- Definition of content types and views based on our experience (generic pages for legal notices and more, news items and a paginated list view)
- Pre-configured block types for easy and flexible contributions (multi-column texts, carousels, videos, tables, text and images, highlights, etc.)
- A set of standard configurations to streamline the back office and disable features we typically never need (e.g. comments)
- Configuration and tooling needed for our developers to get started in the best possible conditions and in a standardized way (containerized development environment with Lando.dev)
As you can see, this installation profile is neither complicated nor revolutionary, but it saves us precious time without adding unnecessary features at the beginning of a project.
Why Is This Installation Profile an Absolutely Essential Asset?
Security
Our installation profile is designed to meet security, accessibility, performance and GDPR standards. Rather than worrying about compliance, focus on content and advanced features.
Speed
The installation profile streamlines the installation process. It brings together the most commonly used features so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time and lets you benefit from prior work—smart, isn’t it?
Cost-Benefit Advantage
Our installation profile vastly accelerates development time, meaning that hours that would have gone into development are instead invested in building advanced features, site customization, and nurturing innovative, value-adding ideas that help make you stand out from the competition. We free up resources on your end and ours. It’s more profitable for everyone.
The Power of Open Source
Because the code is open, you can add and modify features with virtually no limits, so developments based on this installation profile match exactly what you need.
Want to create or redesign your web project without worrying about the details, investing in the essential features for your business that give you a competitive edge? Guess what, so do we.
Shall we talk? Contact us for more details.