DrupalCon London 2011: BUILDING AND MAINTAINING A DISTRIBUTION IN DRUPAL 7

This talk, presented by Antonio De Marco and Andrea Pescetti, focuses on utilizing Drupal 7 to build and maintain website distributions, which serve as repeatable templates for both large-scale and single website deployments. The speakers demonstrate how to package core and contributed modules using a Makefile and profile while ensuring they remain up-to-date throughout the development cycle. They explore Code-Driven Development practices, highlighting the Features module for managing configurations in code, the importance of a well-structured Features design for reusability, and the use of CTools and Exportables for capturing configurations. Finally, attendees learn about the distribution update mechanism that enables effortless configuration updates for live sites, promoting a cleaner workflow and easier collaboration among developers.