Get Inside the Loop

I got excited about Drupal 6 Distributions that promised profiles so you can have site installs offering news sites, church sites, etc. Well is more promise that actuality. I tested three distributions, a church site, newspaper site, and a club site. I was never able to get the church site to install. It failed install and I could not find any notes to get past the problems. The news site initially failed, but I was able to modify the php.ini files to allow more time and memory for the installation. The Innovation News Install Profile installed with roles for writer, editor, photographer, manager, edition manager all complete. I am modifying the taxonomy to use the site as a sample newsroom application. The club site was not a full install but rather a contributed module with additional modules. The core club module failed and was unable to install content types, seems it had a module called images that clashed with another also called images. Forum notes indicated I needed to create some additional fields under CCK to make it work. I chose instead to build a club-type site using fckeditor to handle editing and images. Note: If you a building a number of sites, once you get the fckeditor module installed with editor, you can save time by just copying that module to other installs.

Good news is that the Drupal is working toward improving the install profiles or distributions so that they can be used to custom sites. This would greatly aid others in using Drupal. Currently, Drupal 6 is like a giant jigsaw puzzle of core projects and modules that have to be combined to order to create a site with the features needed for a church site, newspaper site or member club site.
There is an announcement on Drupal.org that says that "when viewing the project page of an install profile" you will have the option of installing the modules with core or not and the list of modules will show the status of each module.
As I said, only one in three install profiles proved useful so I hope they do get the "install profiles", "project files" or "customized distributions" into some kind of useful format.

See all the installation profiles at http://drupal.org/project/installation+profiles . You can also find a number of "Distribution profiles" on the Drupal group site at http://groups.drupal.org/distributions .