A couple of days ago a new unstable release for Drupal 7 was published. One of the many new wonderful features is that installation profiles are now treated as regular modules. This means that you no longer need to learn separate rules, use obscure functions or apply a special Install Profile API. If you know how to write a module, you now know how to write an installation profile. If you want to view a simple example of how this exactly works now, you can take a look at the expert installation profile that ships with Drupal 7.

As Angie mentioned on the dev mailing list:

Install profiles are now basically modules with .install files, .info files to declare dependencies, etc. If you can write a module, you can write an install profile, and you can also do everything from install profiles you can do with modules including use the full Drupal API and write update functions to move from one version to another.

If I remember correctly Starbow was the first to suggest this approach in a post dated about a year ago. It looks like things will work out just fine. Good stuff!

It's been two years since Wordpress MU got released. In my review of the product it became obvious that Wordpress MU provided end-users with all the user-friendliness of a regular Wordpress installation, but that the engine that ties the different blogs was an ugly duck. I also had to admit that Drupal 4.7 was not the perfect solution for multi-user blogging either. In these two years the Wordpress MU engine hasn't changed much but four other software packages didn't stand still.

As mentioned in my previous post I'm working on end-user documentation on how to install an installation profile. I've now come around to publishing the first draft.

Here's an interesting quote by Tim Millwood in his article on Is Drupal too general?:

Drupal offers all the features needed but many of them need installing via contrib modules. Community Server seems to offer all of the features out of the box because like Moodle and Wordpress it is build for a specific purpose.

Last year I did a comparison between Drupal and WordpressMU in terms of how both relate in terms of the multi-user blogging experience. The conclusion was that WordpressMU had all the bells and whistles and that it was clearly more experiences in terms of end-user friendliness and usability, but that it lacked the much more mature technical implementation that Drupal could offer. I made it my personal battle plan to set up an installation profile for Drupal, developing any missing modules in the process, to bring the best possible multi-user blogging platform both in terms of usability and technical stability. I dubbed it DrupalMU.