How to best share a drupal site?

I was recently part of a poster on our Drupal-based Collaborative Sites Platform at EduCause.

As a part of the session proposal, I promised an "online starter kit" that would allow people to download our version of Collaborative Sites, install it on their own servers, tinker away, and perhaps even collaborate with us on improving it moving forward.

In the days before the session started, I found myself scrambling to put together something that would make it easy for someone to give Collab Sites a try.

Working with a colleague, we set up a new Collaborative Site, took out the tiny bit of custom code related to our authentication system, and dropped in a few example nodes. Then we dumped the database and zipped up the codebase, and posted it on our website.

This process made me wonder a few things:

• Is there a better way to share a Drupal site with someone?
• Short of setting up an official distribution, how are people currently sharing their work?
• Are there things that we can do with our codebase, that make it easier to easily find and separate out our custom work when we want to share something?
• What are the best ways for multiple units to collaborate on a common platform, while at the same time customizing for the needs of particular groups/institutions?

Any tips and advice on how to do this now (and what the landscape will look like in the coming months) would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Doug

PS - and of course, if you'd like to give Collaborative Sites a test drive - feel free to download it and let us know your thoughts!