Blogging today about yesterday, because of network problems.
Our famous Prague presentation had a star (I mean an asterisk, in case your thoughts are distorted by the many celestial objects in ESN!): you could
Fire your webmaster*
*After he had installed ESN Satellite for you.
That is, the installation process in ESN Satellite 1.0 is still a bit hard for a non-technical person.
Lowering this barrier is one of the aims for ESN Satellite 2.0, thanks to the installation profiles available in Drupal 5.
So it is not unexpected that the most interesting of today's several sessions was the one about installation profiles by Boris Mann of Bryght: installation profiles are a way to reduce the complexity of an ESN Satellite installation to the point that installing ESN Satellite isn't harder than installing a common program.
The key points relevant to ESN Satellite are:
- Installation profiles can already do what we need: create content, install modules, configure modules and views.
- There is an installation profile Wizard but, answering my question, Boris said it is still insufficient for our needs; i.e., the idea of recreating the installation profile from an existing web site is still far (as he said, "You will need less time to improve the wizard than to do 250 installations, so just write it!"). He said a couple other wizards have been checked in in the last two weeks, so they might be worth a try.
- Unfortunately, documentation on installation profiles is still poor. But we can learn a lot by analyzing the Bryght installation profile in their public repository.
Drupal 6 will also solve one of our problems: maintaining the many pieces of a profile (core and modules must now be updated separately). The idea is that profiles will simply become manifest files: they will contain version specifications for core and modules (basically, contain the version number of core and modules) and their configuration. An automated mechanism would then retrieve aall necessary files form the web. Sounds great!
