Back in 2007 I announced and launched a service to host Drupal 5 sites. The underlying technology relied on database views and triggers from MySQL 5. It was a total mess.

Fast forward to 2010. When I recently checked on the new features in Drupal 7, I suddenly realized that it might be possible to create Drupal sites interactively on a master site, in a similar fashion to the 2007 approach, but without the mucking about with Drupal guts.

These are the features that will help build a new Drupalsite 2010:

• Drupal now supports SQlite. That means, every site can have its own local database
• The new update manager can now receive themes and modules as web uploads so there is no longer a need for a separate ‘thematous’ module to provide web editing for theme files.
• the file sites/sites.php allows to put sub-sites into arbitrary directories.

• The installer can receive settings programatically, so one can build sub-sites and pass in the admin credentials and other parameters.

I have a working prototype now that can create sub-sites as instances of a ‘site’ node type. There is still some work to be done to secure uploaded themes in a Suhosin sandbox so that they cannot harm each other or the server. But, I am quite confident that this will work out nicely.