I attended an Acquia webinar last week on Drupal Commons. There will be a recording of it here shortly (look for November 11 2010).

Drupal Commons is a pre packaged Drupal 6 (D6) distribution by Acquia. It includes an install profile, a patched D6 core, a set of community sourced modules, some Acquia modules and a Drupal Commons core (glue) module.

Drupal Commons goal is to provide an out of the box community building solution based on Drupal. It requires a lot of memory (128MB to PHP minimum) and runs heavy. A D7 release is on the cards but has no release date – too many modules require D7 ports at this stage.

Here are a list of modules broken down into feature sets:

Content / Collaboration

  • OG (organic groups)
  • Shoutbox
  • Tagadelic
  • Drupal Wiki
  • Freelinking
  • Profiles (core)
  • CCK (content types)
  • Discussions
  • + 10 more

Users

  • Profiles (core)
  • Relationships (friending)
  • Heartbeat
  • Userpoints (reputation) but not Badges (though that’s possible)

Personalisation

  • Flags (bookmarks)
  • Panels + Context (custom layout per path)
  • Apache SOLR (filters for search)
  • Acquia Search (from Acquia Network Subscription – a pay service – for faceted results and content recommendation)

Management

  • Quant + Charting
  • Featured

General

  • Admin menu
  • CTools
  • Calendar, Date and Time
  • Flags
  • Messaging + Notifications
  • Strongarm (configuration in code)
  • Token
  • Skinr (theming)
  • Rules
  • Vertical Tabs (theming)
  • jQuery UI (theming)

Features not in Commons but requested (contribute to http://commons.acquia.com/ to add your vote)

  • Projects
  • Subgroups
  • per group layout
  • per group content types
  • Homebox (user level dashboard)
  • community tagging
  • popular content block
  • private messaging
  • document management

Acquia offer Commons open and as a managed service, as an implementation service and with their network subscription.