Profile Manager is neat (as long as it’s not messed up). It’s a Mobile Device Management (MDM) server that also manages profiles for computers and users.
Behind the scenes, it’s a Rails app using the Sproutcore javascript framework to make it pretty and PostgreSQL as the database backend. It generates mobileconfig profiles that are basically special xml docs that are applied to devices.
Clients can either login to the web portal via http://server.example.com/profilemanager to manually download profiles that apply to either users or devices, or updated profiles can be pushed to clients via push notification services (that also have to be enabled, server side) for devices that already have profiles.
Here’s a possibly helpful walk-through. The afp548 folks had a video up but have since removed it. Not sure why, thou