Using a distribution
by Chaz Chumley, Matt Glaman, Richard Jones, Nick Abbott
Drupal 8: Enterprise Web Development
- Drupal 8: Enterprise Web Development
- Table of Contents
- Drupal 8: Enterprise Web Development
- Credits
- Preface
- 1. Module 1
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Installation
- 3. Basic Concepts
- 4. Getting Started with the UI
- 5. Basic Content
- 6. Structure
- 7. Advanced Content
- 8. Configuration
- 9. Users and Access Control
- 10. Optional Features
- 11. Reports
- 12. Extending Drupal
- 13. Theming Drupal
- 14. Getting Support
- 2. Module 2
- 1. Up and Running with Drupal 8
- 2. The Content Authoring Experience
- 3. Displaying Content through Views
- 4. Extending Drupal
- 5. Frontend for the Win
- 6. Creating Forms with the Form API
- 7. Plug and Play with Plugins
- 8. Multilingual and Internationalization
- 9. Configuration Management – Deploying in Drupal 8
- 10. The Entity API
- 11. Off the Drupalicon Island
- 12. Web Services
- 13. The Drupal CLI
- 3. Module 3
- 1. Setting Up Our Development Environment
- 2. Theme Administration
- 3. Dissecting a Theme
- Setting up a local development environment
- Default themes versus custom themes
- Folder structure and naming conventions
- Managing configuration in Drupal 8
- Reviewing the new info.yml file
- The role of templates in Drupal
- Creating our first basic theme
- Introducing Twig
- Template variables
- The role of the theme file in Drupal
- Summary
- 4. Getting Started – Creating Themes
- 5. Prepping Our Project
- 6. Theming Our Homepage
- Creating our HTML wrapper
- Creating our homepage
- Implementing our Header Top region
- Implementing our Header region
- Adding a logo
- Enabling Site branding
- Printing our Header region
- Creating Block templates
- Implementing our search form block
- Placing our search form block
- Creating a search form block template
- Adding custom JavaScript
- Creating an input element template
- Working with menus
- Creating a menu template
- Creating System Menu block template
- Creating a sticky header
- Implementing our Headline Region
- Implementing our Before Content region
- Implementing the footer
- Summary
- 7. Theming Our Interior Page
- 8. Theming Our Blog Listing Page
- Reviewing the Blog Listing mockup
- Creating our blog listing
- Creating a Post Listing view
- Managing our Post Listing block
- Implementing our Node template
- Adding CSS classes to Twig
- Working with content variables
- Using the without filter
- Creating our post image slider
- Working with field templates
- Adding the Owl Carousel library
- Using Twig filters for dates
- Printing title and teaser
- Creating our post metadata
- Field templates and taxonomy
- Handling comments in Drupal 8
- Creating a theme file
- Creating a Categories block
- Managing our Categories block
- Implementing responsive sidebars
- Theming a Block template
- Drupal Views and Twig templates
- Managing popular versus recent content
- Adding the About Us block
- Summary
- 9. Theming Our Blog Detail Page
- Reviewing the Blog detail mockup
- Previewing our Blog detail page
- Creating a Post Full template
- Working with comments
- Implementing social sharing capabilities
- Summary
- 10. Theming Our Contact Page
- 11. Theming Our Search Results
- 12. Tips, Tricks, and Where to Go from Here
- A. Biblography
- Index
A distribution is a contributed installation profile that is not provided by Drupal core. Why would you want to use a distribution? Distributions provide a specialized version of Drupal with specific feature sets. On Drupal.org when you download an installation profile it not only includes the profile and its modules but a version of Drupal core. Hence the name distribution. You can find a list of all Drupal distributions here https://www.drupal.org/project/project_distribution.
We will follow these steps to download a distribution to use as a customized version of Drupal 8:
- Download a distribution from Drupal.org. For this recipe let's use the Demo Framework provided by Acquia https://www.drupal.org/project/df.
- Select the recommended version for the 8.x branch.
- Extract the folder contents to your web server's document root. You'll notice there is Drupal core and, within the profiles folder, the installation profile's folder
df. - Install Drupal as you would normally, by visiting your Drupal site in your browser.
- Demo Framework declares itself as an exclusive profile. Distributions which declare this are automatically selected and assumed to be the default installation option.
Note
The exclusive flag was added with Drupal 7.22 to improve the experience of using a Drupal distribution http://drupal.org/node/1961012.
- Follow the installation instructions and you'll have installed the distribution!
Installation profiles work by including additional modules that are part of the contributed project realm or custom modules. The profile will then define them as dependencies to be installed with Drupal. When you select an installation profile, you are instructing Drupal to install a set of modules on installation.
Distributions provide a specialized version of Drupal with specific feature sets, but there are a few items worth discussing.
The current standard for generating a built distribution is the utilization of Drush and makefiles. Makefiles allow a user to define a specific version of Drupal core and other projects (themes, modules, third party libraries) that will make up a Drupal code base. It is not a dependency management workflow, like Composer, but is a build tool.
If you look at the Demo Framework's folder you will see drupal-org.make and drupal-org-core.make. These are parsed by the Drupal.org packager to compile the code base and package it as a .zip or .tar.gz, like the one you downloaded.
As shown in the first recipe, you can install a Drupal site through the Drush tool. You can instruct Drush to use a specific installation profile by providing it as the first argument. The following command would install the Drupal 8 site using the Demo Framework.
$ drush pm-download df $ drush site-install df –db-url=mysql://user:pass@localhost/database
- See Chapter 13, Drupal CLI, for information on makefiles.
- Drush documentation page for drush make http://www.drush.org/en/master/make/
- Distribution documentation on Drupal.org, https://www.drupal.org/documentation/build/distributions
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