Installation Profile Utilities

There are a couple of Drupal projects that will help you create an installation profile.

Install Profile API

If you're writing a profile for Drupal 5 or 6, you can make use of the Install Profile API, which provides a set of helper functions that make it easier to create, update, or delete elements from Drupal's data structures. You will still have to be familiar with PHP; this is not an "end user" module.

Profile Generator

Drupal 5 users can get a huge jump-start on an installation profile by using the Profile Generator module to create a profile for an existing site.

Ideally, you install Drupal and selected contributed modules as usual, configure the site, and add generic content until your site is just as you want a new site to look. Then you activate Profile Generator to create a profile which replicates your site.

In practice, you will almost certainly have to do some manual tweaking of the installation profile functions. At the very least, you probably want to remove the code that installs Profile Generator (A line referring to profile_generator in the _profile_modules hook.)

(There used to be an alternative to Profile Generator: The Profile Wizard component of the Install Profile API project (described above). But the Profile Wizard has since been deprecated.)

See Groups.Drupal.org/Distributions for ongoing discussion about installation profiles.