Close to a yer ago, Drupal 5 was released with a basic installer which makes new site setups easier, but it was still just the beginning. The real power as we thought was in contributed install profiles which allow you to set up different site types with ease.
The new Drupal 6 we are preparing for release comes with a nicely themed installer, which has a site configuration form (check out the video!)and even more capabilities for an install profile to hook into and do cool things on install. But despite encouragement from different parties, and even a DrupalCon Barcelona session by Boris Mann on install profiles, where some people became enthusiastic about building core install profiles for Drupal 6, the base system does not show off the different possibilities still.
However, yesterday Dries Buytaert posted an interesting note to the development mailing list, saying:
I don't mind having two or three profiles ship with Drupal core. They could help market install profiles and gives people one or two concrete examples to start from when building their own profiles. I think this would come a long way in helping to promote install profiles.
Specifically, I'm willing to accept a dummy.profile that populates your Drupal site with some dummy data and that gives you a kick start by pre-configuring a number of common things (i.e. it could create an about-page at q?=about, and it could setup a contact form that is accessible from the primary navigation). In fact, I wouldn't mind a blog.profile either -- it could also setup 'tags'-vocabulary with a term 'Drupal' or something.
If we think this is important, and if they emerge within the next day or two, we could ship those with Drupal 6. These are important usability/strategic improvements, not API changes.
We have seen some new functionality developed for Drupal 6 in tight collaboration quickly, and fortunately, there are existing code bases to build on for a single user blog install profile (thanks to Matt Farina for the link) or a 'dummy' profile. Let's keep quickly moving on these and we will get good examples of cool Drupal use cases, as well as a lot more visibility for Drupal's install profile support.