Drupal Distro Watch is a community-powered rating and review service dedicated to helping you find the best Drupal distributions! We try to offer a good visible way of browsing trough a natural selection of different kind of distributions and installation profiles. We hope that this site would help to improve the odds of collaboration over competition and also increase the consistency of how distributions are developed and released.

Dries writes of Drupal Distributions:
It is important that Drupal distributions collaborate, and not compete. To do so, we have to provide Drupal distributions an environment that encourages collaboration, and that allows for specialization (such as custom documentation and support) without introducing incompatibilities that drive competition.

The good news is that we know how to do this. We've been through this already with CivicSpace (previously called "DeanSpace"), a Drupal distribution for online campaign management and grassroots activism. They were quick to realize that the success of the CivicSpace distribution depends on the success Drupal core, and vice versa. The decided they shouldn't fork core development. Instead, CivicSpace decided to do all its development on the drupal.org infrastructure, to synchronize releases, to submit all patches upstream, to centralize bug reports, and to share documentation where possible. Collaboration, not competition.

The bad news is that can be hard work. People will find that creating a distribution is fun and easy, but that being a responsible maintainer might be a lot less fun. Who wants to track changes, write documentation, maintain modules, provide upgrade paths, manage releases and provide support for years to come?

If you have any suggestions, corrections please, contact us

Sincerely,

Drupal Distro Watch Team