GSoC 2007 - Drupal Automated Staging Toolkit

I'm participating in SoC 2007 with a project for Drupal - a toolkit for testers for automating the process of creating a Drupal site running a specific configuration. The basic idea is that you specify in an XML file the enabled code modules you want, the CVS versions and patches for each module, the web server, database server and PHP configuration, and the size and shape of the test dataset and users. The tools will then generate the Drupal site code-tree you want, the server configuration files and directives, and database scripts for the test data and users. These are then staged to the server location, and voila, a complete Drupal site ready to go, for unit and regression testing code or benchmarking different server configurations. Time permitting, we'll see if we can automatically stage to a Xen or VMWare virtual image, and then have a self-contained virtual image ready for advanced testing scenarios. I'm really stoked about this project, so thanks to all the Drupal folks who voted for it.