In my attempts to set up a copy of our moodle installation without all the courses and users, I have followed the instructions to create a defaults.php file with settings such as:
$defaults['pluginname']['name'] = 'value';
$defaults['moodle']['name'] = 'value';
And I added a script to also copy settings from mdl_config_log from my old database into my new database.
I copied config.php settings, including the overrides for default blocks.
This works pretty well but there are still lots of settings missing. For example, the default blocks override doesn't give the same results so default blocks must be being configured/overridden some other way. There are also a lot of other little things such as the block that shows your profile information has links to "view my inbox" and "edit my profile" that I'm not sure where they are coming from. Also, there are lots of settings such as adding other user profile fields. How can I automate these?
Are there other ways to automate the configuration that I'm missing?