There has been a surge of interest lately to try and create Drupal-driven artist and music websites. I know many members of the Drupal community have been frustrated in trying to leverage Drupal for art and music websites because:

1. Artists and musicians don't understand how Drupal could help them
2. The learning curve for Drupal is too high
3. Developers can't find other developers who are interested in using Drupal to create artist and music websites
4. Information overload on drupal.org

As a result, I've launched a website to address the problems above: http://www.drupalART.org/.

The idea behind http://www.drupalART.org/ is to create an infrastructure where interested developers can meet each other and discuss topics on a forum/mailing list. It also serves as a reference point for working examples of how Drupal can work for artists and musicians. As such, the site is geared towards providing as much help, guidance, and documentation as possible for newbies and those unfamiliar with Drupal.

Goals of the site:

1. Create examples that will showcase how Drupal can be used to create art and music websites, and assist developers who are looking for ideas or help.

   Examples could include:

   • links to sandboxes or demos
   • pseudo-distributions (pre-configured drupal files + database dump)
   • tips & tricks
   • tutorials
   • theming help
2. Create documentation to assist in the Drupal documentation and marketing effort, as well as provide configuration profiles for the upcoming Drupal installer
3. Provide a meeting place for interested Drupal developers (forum/mailing list)
4. Provide a meeting place for artists and musicians to discuss how the internet can help them (forum/mailing list)

I would like to stress that drupalART does not aim to create forked code, forked documentation, or a separate drupal distribution. All efforts are geared towards making the drupal community stronger as a whole, and to bridge the gap between developers, users, and newbies. All technical drupal development should take place on drupal.org infrastructure. Any relevant or useful information on drupalART should be mirrored on drupal.org (and vice versa).

Ultimately drupalART.org would like to merge completely with drupal.org (perhaps as a subdomain?). Currently drupal.org is overloaded with information and it makes it difficult to search for relevant items. Not to mention the overwhelming amount of information often scares away newbies and even some developers when they first glance at the site.

To kick things off, I've provided the first example. I created a tutorial on how to build a community podcast site, with an embedded flash player. The player detects if it is on a blog page and loads in the RSS feed of that blog page, and begins playing the first song of the podcast. A podcast is treated as a regular blog RSS 2.0 feed with mp3 file attachments. I also made a demo site of the community podcast example in action.

I really hope this site will be informative and useful. Your feedback and contributions are appreciated too! Let me know if you think there is anything else that could be done to improve drupalART.org. If you are interested in participating, you can join the mailing lists and forum discussion or you can start posting examples.

Farsheed