Pardon the stream of thought post. I'm getting ideas out of my head on a project. Some of these ideas will be used later.

Tom and I have been working hard for the last couple of months on creating a distribution of Drupal. We put the initial alpha release for download on our site this weekend.

Initially we intended on having a collection of modules, settings and tweaks as a starting point for most Drupal projects. The more we worked on this project, the more it made sense to have it as a distribution. To my knowledge there is no popular distribution of Drupal in the same way that there is Red Hat or Ubuntu or Debian for Linux. Dries is now doing this with his company Acquia. I guess we doing this too.

Drupal is a powerful tool but as of right now you still need an experienced developer to launch a Drupal site. This is not the case with Wordpress or Joomla.

There are many hundreds of modules. Some are essential and should be a part of almost any Drupal site. I can't imagine ever launching another Drupal site without Token, Pathauto, CCK or Views. Some are nice-to-haves that you will almost always want. Among the nice-to-haves, there are many modules that do nearly the same thing. Should you use "Share This" or "Add This" for social bookmarking? Why?

Drupal does not come with contributed modules. Without a Drupal distribution developers are their own when it comes to identifying, evaluating, learning and customizing modules. Our hope is that with this distribution most of what you will need to do with your Web site you will be able to do without hitting forums or doing module research that has already been done countless times by others.

We are also cooking up a collection of recipes that are pre-configured. These are typically content types that have been themed and have pre-installed views and taxonomies for a variety of purposes. Examples include a job board system, paginated articles, downloadable press releases, news and advanced user profiles. We plan on having screencasts for each of these recipes in addition to the distribution install profile pre-configuring them.

A lot of time has been spent in getting modules to play nice with each other. Some input filters have be applied in a specific order to work properly. Some modules need to be configured a certain way to work properly with other modules. These are not necessarily bugs in modules themselves but nonetheless, we often find ourselves having to do configuration work here and there to get modules to compliment each other. The install profile makes all of these configurations.