Let me try to pull together some of ideas I've scattered around cyberspace, as well as provide additional detail. I'll do this in the form of a Q&A - I'll probably be revising this, adding clarity as time permits. Please don't hesitate to comment and/or ask me some questions.

We're gearing up to build a Drupal-based platform for indie bands and labels.

Drupal is an interactive community platform where fans can connect with bands as opposed to more traditional flash based marketing sites. It provides a central location for fans to join, share, and collaborate, providing large amounts of content that couldn’t be matched by editors and band members.

Check out the feature list and some of the amazing Drupal sites already in the wild.

The following is a sampling of Drupal powered sites in the fields of arts, media, community, and education.

I spent a good part of ALL DAY trying to get Drupal (the CMS I'm running) updated to the latest version. Seems to be working now - getting it to look good is a task for another day. Hope you like baby blue!?!

• Chapter Three LLC: A Perfect Storm for Drupal

Check out That Other Paper - probably the best site of it's kind on Drupal. Would be great if the fine folks, who produced this site, could contribute towards the building of an alt-weekly style distribution. Yeah, baby!

Chris Messina (aka FactoryJoe), gave a nice mention of the newly minted Microformats in Drupal Group. For those who don't know, Chris is one of the leading microformat evangelists, and somebody who has a bit of experience with Drupal. Hopefully we'll have Chris, and some other folks from the microformat community, joining the group and helping us figure out

there will bring a small tsunami of Drupal distributions built around a hosted service model...

Is he talking about providers, like Bryght or CivicSpace, serving up a wide array of custom distributions and related services as a value add to their customers? What I don't quite get (assuming I'm reading this correctly), is if and/or how their distributions would be different than any distribution properly borne out of, and freely available to, the community. In other words, in addition to the convenience, specialized skills and services, will there be profiles/distributions that only will be available thru certain providers?

There's a lot of buzz 'round the Drupal community regarding install profiles and distributions. Here's a compilation from some of the posts by Dries Buytart, Kieran Lal, and Farsheed Hamidi-Toosi.

Distribution profiles are:

• a way of pre-configuring drupal right out of the box for a specific purpose or community
• bundles of modular functionality and configurations that target various specific functionality out of the box

Distribution profiles will: