Install profiles and monitored support make Drupal good for everyone - not just experts

Some technical minded Drupal users are fine and happy installing Drupal themselves. They know how to choose the modules and themes needed to make their project happen. Indeed, these savvy users have little need for support, monitoring, patching and consulting.

However, as Drupal's user base gets bigger, and larger clients like enterprises and universities sign-on to the open source revolution, the need for a technical support "safety-net" (in the form of someone keeping a technical eye to make sure everything is up to date and humming along) becomes more apparent.

At Raincity Studios, we know this need well. This demand is why we market the Bryght hosting product which includes a pre-selected and supported set of modules configured ready-to-go, out-of-the-chute.

We also know variety is a good thing. 'Tis better to allow customers to choose the service which best fits their needs than tell them "one size fits all."

With this in mind, Raincity Studios recently announced a platinum partnership with Acquia. Founded by new Ph. D and Drupal ringleader Dreis Buytaert and business-veteran Jay Batson (and a crew of Drupalatti), Acquia provide a commercially-supported distribution of Drupal as well as a subscription-based support network.

This model means that companies and organizations can confidentially use Acquia Drupal install to run their dynamic web presence and enjoy support and network services like uptime monitoring, update notifications, patches and Mollom spam blocking.

Much like the Bryght Basic install, Acquia Drupal is licensed via GPL and includes Drupal core and a suite of popular modules.  With this new offering, Raincity Studios customers will be able to choose between hosting packages for Bryght Light, Bryght VPS and Bryght Acquia.

Judging by the feedback I received in person and from thund3rbox, my Anatomy of a Drupal Install Profile session at DrupalCamp LA last Saturday was well received. I have updated it with the update Keynote, PDF and Powerpoint presentation that I actually used. Next up will be some Drupal install profile screencasts as requested by the people at the session in LA. Got suggestions, feedback, etc? Please edit the Anatomy of a Drupal Install Profile wiki page

[Cross posted from my personal blog]

Have you ever built an awesome Drupal website or webapp and wanted to share it with others or clone to save you config time? Then Drupal Install Profiles are for you! I'll be leading a session called Anatomy of a Drupal Install Profile at DrupalCamp LA (organized by super organizer and super everything Crystal Williams) this Saturday September 8, 2007 in Los Angeles at AOL in Beverly Hills. The presentation is already available (I reserve the right to drastically modify it :-) !) on our public wiki page, AnatomyOfADrupalInstallProfile as a Keynote, PDF and PowerPoint attachment. Feel free to edit the wiki page with your thoughts, etc.

cc

Check out our latest Drupal 5 screencasts from the April 3, 2007 Tag:

• 3 April 2007 Bryght Basic Drupal Install Profile Quick Tour
• Drupal 5 Screencast: 3 April 2007 Drupal Wiki Install Profile Quick Peek

This year is going to be a bumpy one, but we're all pulling together and doing some great stuff. We just pushed another release of our bryghtbase codebase to our Bryght Light mass hosting service. It's the Drupal 5 release you get when you push signup, or the default install when you have one of our production hosting virtual private servers.

I've been breaking my head on install profiles. We naturally want to set up a bunch of stuff "out of the box". Now that Drupal 5 has "native" install profiles, we can work with the codebase directly, which makes things a lot easier. But, some things are still too hard. Basically, we need to make a library of CRUD functions for Drupal. Some of these may make it into future releases, ideally. For now, I've started scavenging some of the custom functions we've written in the past (e.g. one loops through profile fields and creates them -- see https://svn.bryght.com/dev/browser/bryghtbase/DRUPAL-5/trunk/html/profil...), and will be working with the community to standardize them.

Next up: planning for a Community profile and thinking about what we might put in a ProBlogger one.