For years I've talked about how I think that distributions are the future of Drupal. Drupal is a flexible toolkit. You can do everything from clone Flickr, Twitter, Craigslist, or Etsy to building high-performance, high-demand sites like those for The Grammys, The Economist, or The Whitehouse. However creating sites like these has become an art in and of itself. On its own, Drupal core just doesn't do that much. So for years, people have been asking when Lullabot is going to do a distribution. We'd toyed with doing some sort of a generic core-plus-the-modules-that-we-always-use distribution, but this seemed like it would ultimately be more effort than it was worth.

But several months ago we started building Drupalize.me, our subscription based video training site. Early in the project, it became apparent that this type of functionality would be very useful to several of our media clients, to other training organizations, and to the Internet at large. So we paused Drupalize.me development and reworked our development strategy. Rather than simply solving our specific use case for Drupalize.me, we architected a more flexible system which would fit the needs of more generalized paid-access video sites.

We launched Drupalize.me about six weeks ago and we're really happy with the site. Additionally, we have this wonderful side effect: a Drupal-based paid-access video delivery platform. We're calling it Videola, and we've made a home for it at http://videola.tv. We've run the platform through its paces with Drupalize.me and we're ready to start building hosted Videola sites for others today.

But wait, you say... that's not a distribution, that's a service! Are you going to release this as a distribution? Heck yes we are! We're working on a free open source distribution of Videola. However, we don't want to release it before we've had a chance to fully generalize it and test it out. We're working on that part now and we hope to have something for you to download before DrupalCon. If you're a Drupal developer and you want to try out the Videola distribution when it's ready, visit Videola.tv and click "Get Notified". We'll send you an email when it's ready for download.

If you'd like Lullabot to build you a hosted, supported Videola site, contact us for a quote.

I've submitted a talk about Videola for DrupalCon Chicago. Go give it some votes!