There were a few interesting talks today, but I'm describing the most relevant for ESN Satellite 2.
Sifbuilder presented their proposal about Automatic drupal site generation, module creation and site clonage: it is an alternative to installation profiles, developed by some guys who, answering my question, said they had never heard of installation profiles until yesterday.
Warning: this post is getting technical from this point on.
So they tried to develop their way to automatically configure and clone a Drupal web site. At first view, it looks like an unbelievable hack: the guy was typing some 250-characters long obscure command lines in Windows and the site would show up. In fact, the mechanism is cleaner than it seems at first view: XML files contain download instructions and so on, so the site profile (the package, as it will be known in Drupal 6) in more or less readable. Their tool is based on the usual brute mechanism of SQL dumps and ZIP archives, but refined with dome intelligence that permits adding new prefixes to tables and some other adjustments.
Easy to dismiss this as an ugly attempt to mimick what an installation profile does. The fact is, this stuff works and is ready. The guy, again answering my question, said his tools can probably address our needs, and that we should look at some of his canned website configurations for documentation. I might be worth a try. In the long run, installation profiles will probably grow to be much better than this, but in this moment these tools work.
