distribution profile

Check it out here: http://drupaled.alphabetademo.org

The site can function as a blogging platform, a podcasting platform, a wiki, an informal learning space, a course management space, and/or as a replacement for an organizational intranet. Within the site, users can create working groups or communities of practice. The site also supports social bookmarking. The homepage of the site gives a more complete overview of the functionality.

It's looking like there's already a ton of interest and excitement pertaining to install profiles and distributions. As Drupal groups seem to be an ideal platform for collaboration, I'm thinking we should continue to figure out/define some best practices or rules of the road pertaining to keeping the communication open while keeping the signal to noise ratio high.

I'm assuming there are no clear answers or set guidelines, but here are some questions...

This (somewhat old) post from Zacker does a great job summing up a catch-22 that comes along with an open source community like Drupal (allow me to excerpt):

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• most of the value created by the Drupal community that vendors and consultants rely on to sell as services to customers come from unpaid core contributions
• many of the seasoned Drupal core hackers are getting job offers left and right to come and do Drupal consulting full time.
• This is creating a scenario in which while many more people are paying their bills through Drupal hacking and more and more business are built around business value created by the Drupal community, it is not getting any easier to make sure the heavy lifting on core work is getting done.

What can we do now to make sure that some of the money coming into the community over the next year is put back in to supporting the core work that we as a community are relying on?

Well, probably one of the biggest sources of information for this group is the page in the handbook:

HOWTO: Write an installation profile for the Drupal installer.

I'm not sure how recent that document really is, though. The most recent version is from June. I may have to try it out to find out the status.

Hey, everybody!

Maybe someone will recognize me; I post here and there, but I would like to begin by pointing out that I did not create this group because I want to moderate it or set it's agenda; I created it so that one was available and I see my role as keeping track of what kind of Drupal distribution profiles are being developed or discussed and then reporting that information back to this group.