I am now batting nodes, complete with imagefield, between separate instances of Drupal with merriment and glee. For yes, I do have a working beta of Content distribution.
I'm about to quickly write a service to get CCK's content_fields() array from the remote, distributing site, so that the retrieving site can show a UI of possible values for a Views nodereference argument. Try it. It all makes sense once you do.
I had a fun afternoon a few months back when all the imagecache images broke on a site I'd just taken live. I've just figured it out, so I'm telling you about it.
This was the situation:
On the development domain, all worked fine. On the subsite domain, nothing.
I've been putting off setting up multisite on my localhost for ages, mostly because in the past I've found getting Apache virtual hosts to work can be a bit tricky: not impossible, but the sort of thing where I could easily lose an hour on a minor thing I've forgotten to do. And after all, with a shiny new iMac and a hard drive whose proportions I can't even remember, why not just 'drush dl' all over again?
Situation: you need a heap of imagefields that more or less have the same setup. Let's not go into why.
You could spend half an hour bored witless clicking through the interface.
Or you could create just the one field, export the content type with content copy, and then doctor the code a little before importing it back in. Like this....
<?php
// The usual content type stuff here.
// Set of image fields
$image_fields = array(
'field_image_1' => 'Image 1',
'field_image_2' => 'Image 2',
// etc
);
foreach ($image_fields as $name => $label) {
Okay, so I lied. But module builder can save you a lot of time when writing custom modules.
And it now works with drush, too. I added support for drush a few weeks ago, which let you do things like "$ drush mb mymodule cron init menu nodeapi --write" and hey presto, a new module folder is created, with an info file and a module file, with hook implementations ready to do your (evil) bidding. (Note: this blog does not sanction use of Drupal, module builder, or drush for evil.)