What I am suggesting is a small change like the one at the end of this email. It will give the opportunity to maintain all or modst of the scenarios described so far, and will make drupal more packageable by the distributions, as . The downside is that it will require a central configuration file ( put in /etc/drupal ;)

This suggestion should not have any performance implications, as far as I am aware, apart from the loading of the configuration file, let's be serious.

I wouldn't argue with any default directory scheme suggested, I like the current one myself, as long as it is trivial (read standard and configurable) for an admin to set up the directory structure they like, and drupal is packageable without modifications bar config by debian.

Be flexible if it doesn't hurt you.

Cheers, Vlado

I think your idea has a lot of merit, and provides excellent flexibility. What I am not clear on is, for shared hosting, where would this file go? Also, how does it map into the notion "a directory that does not need to be changed" which I am lobbying for? My goal is to reduce clutter in the parent directory, and provide a drop in upgrade feature for core. I think we can marry the two ideas (mine, and yours) like this: public_html/.htaccess.example public_html/index.php public_html/drupal/ public_html/drupal/drupal.php <==== THIS IS THE NEW FILE public_html/drupal/includes/ public_html/drupal/modules/ public_html/drupal/themes/ public_html/drupal/misc/ public_html/drupal/doc (contains all the .TXT files) public_html/local/ public_html/local/sites public_html/local/sites/default/ public_html/local/sites/default/settings.php.example public_html/local/modules (contrib modules that are shared for all sites - empty) public_html/local/themes (contrib themes that are shared for all sites - empty) In the drupal.php file, we have this: <?php // Directory where drupal core is located $drupal_core = 'drupal'; // Directory where site configurations, and contributed modules and themes are located $drupal_sites = 'local'; ?> conf_init() will be like this: $drupal_conf='drupal/drupal.php'; foreach (array("$sites/$config/$dir/$file", "$sites/$config/$dir/$name/$file", "$core/$dir/$file", "$core/$dir/$name/$file") as $file) { if (file_exists($file)) { $files[$type][$name] = $file; break; } } This achieves everything I wanted for shared hosting, where drop in upgrade is easy, and there is no clutter. Yet, with your added flexibility, distros can change $drupal_conf to anything they like, and/or the contents of the drupal.php file as well.