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Installation profiles on Site Factory

Site Factory uses installation profiles to define base features for your platform. After deploying a profile to Site Factory and enabling it, website builders may select the profile when creating a new website. Add your installation profiles to your custom distribution and enable the installation profiles for Site Factory to display the installation profiles on the Create a new site page.

Depending on your needs, your Site Factory platform can contain a single profile for use on all websites, sub-profiles for large groups of websites, or nested sub-profiles for more tailored features. When designing your profiles, you must take the following aspects of website governance into account:

  • Platform layer: Core features of your platform, on which you build additional features
  • Backend feature layer: Features available for managing, creating, and interacting with content
  • Front-end layer: Content in your websites, and its formatting and display

Important

To avoid development missteps and wasted effort, do not begin development on individual websites until you have defined your platform’s profile architecture as part of your Site Factory governance strategy.

When designing and implementing profiles, consider:

For instructions about enabling installation profiles on your Factory, or selecting a profile when creating a new website, see Managing installation profiles in your Factory.

Architecture considerations for profiles

When selecting a profile architecture for your platform, consider the following questions from a platform and not individual website perspective:

  • What global configuration is valid across websites sharing a profile?
  • What configurations (such as modules and permissions) must differ across environments?
  • What default configurations, such as theme and website name, must website builders or administrators configure?
  • Does your development and testing process account for creating new websites on the profile, and provide updates to existing websites created by older versions of the profile?

Minimum requirements for profiles

To work with Site Factory, an installation profile must:

  • Be based on Drupal core.
  • Include the Site Factory Connector module to provide necessary platform management functions, such as the acsf-init command.
  • Include an admin role.

Drupal 7 installation profiles

For information about creating a Drupal 7 installation profile for use with your codebase, see How to Write a Drupal 7 Installation Profile on Drupal.org.

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