One new feature I had not paid much attention to in Drupal 5.x is the installation profiles. I almost did not notice they have their own download section on drupal.org. You can set almost anything post-install, including

• Turning on modules (core and contrib)
• Set permissions
• Create default user roles
• Enable translations
• Enable specific theme
• Enable blocks
• Setting site variables

This could save peoples hours, and enable newcomers to easier enjoy the power of Drupal. It is not always easy to know which modules you need, and how to configure them. Wiki and developer site with CVS+project are two good examples. (Or may be a profile for this, yes it runs on Drupal. :D)

Currently, you still have to pre-download all the required files, but I see a discussion somewhere saying there will be facility for profile creator to specify modules/themes/etc to be included, then the tarball will have all that is needed in one download. It still seems very manual and complex to create according to this manual page, but this discussion sounds like that will improve soon. (Though I'm not sure how, I admit I don't know what CRUD is or how it improve your life.) Further development can be tracked in the Distributions Group.

Topics: Drupalwebdev