Ok, this is an unfair cross-post, but it's my cross-post, so comment where you will.. Either way, you'll have to wade through the copious collection of spam comments before I see it and approve... What's this about captcha?
Here's what I posted on lullabot after listening to a great podcast:
Because all good projects need a name, I would start there: DDB ("Drupal DDB Builder").
- DDB is a hosted Drupal instance with a DDB module that scans all installed modules for DDB hooks.
- A list of these modules and their descriptions is presented to the user with a checkbox, "install," "install, but don't activate," etc.
- Next, presented in a wizard fashion while iterating thru each selected module, a DDB hook on each DDB-aware module presents specific fields defined by the module's developer that allow the user the opportunity to seed values*.
- Once all DDB-aware modules have been iterated, the db is dumped, either the folder tree is tar'd and feathered or a bunch of wget's are queued up (to grab the modules from d.o.. come on, you followed along this far), and the user is presented with a single download.
* For instance, a series of basic pages can be built either with Lorem Ipsum text (if the developer doesn't expose the field as a form field) or by values entered on the form. Heck, even the User module could expose some fields, giving the user the opportunity to create multiple users (one admin, one user, say) to be available at launch.
Voila! Now.. I already can make an On this date module, and I know there's a forms api tut somewhere tucked away..