Our first bit of work doesn't involve any coding. We need to set up the directories for our custom Drupal distribution.
Our goal is to create a distribution of Drupal that includes our modules and theme. We are not migrating a site.
Thus, we want to start out with a pristine copy of Drupal—one that has not yet been installed or configured. It's probably easiest to start with a fresh copy downloaded from Drupal.org. This ensures that we have the most recent set of security patches and so on.
Note
Migrating tip: you've got it already!
If you are working on an installation for migration instead of one intended for new sites, there is no need to start from a pristine configuration. You will want to keep all the changes you have made (including, probably, the settings files and the contents of the drupal/files/ directory.
Once we have a pristine copy of Drupal, we need to unpack it. To distinguish our distribution from the normal Drupal one, it is a good idea to rename the...