Tom Geller: How to create Drupal exercise files that work every time

lynda.com has now released five of my Drupal courses (which you can Acquia Dev Desktop as their AMP stack;

I tried several solutions, even attempting to commission an all-in-one solution. Previous courses used varying methods, with varying degrees of success — and they usually required too much explanation. Here's what I finally settled on:

1. Provide one copy of the base Drupal distribution, without the /sites folder. Yes, that means that students will be installing an out-of-date copy of Drupal. But again, these sites will be locally hosted, and not exposed to the internet. (We also direct them to instructions on how to update the site to the latest version if they want.)
2. Give instructions on how to import that base copy of Drupal into Acquia Dev Desktop. This sets up the stack, and puts predictable values into the settings.php file.
3. For each video, provide two files:

• a .zip of the /sites folder, which includes all assets and modules installed up to that point in the course; and
• a .zip or .gz of the database. Compression is important because Acquia Dev Desktop imposes a 2MB upload limit in a crucial place. We've manually removed the "CREATE DATABASE" line from the database before compressing it.

4. To start at any point in the course, instruct students to:

• Replace the current /sites folder with that video's /sites folder; and
• Import the database via phpMyAdmin (which is included with Acquia Dev Desktop).

When the new courses become available, I hope to be able to post the video we created that explains all this.

How would you solve this problem?