This session will discuss the experience building on top of a distribution while the distribution was still being built:

Cancer Connections is a website run by the Cancer Council of NSW, assisted by other Cancer Council bodies across Australia. Its aim is to create a safe online community for cancer sufferers and their loved ones, a place where they can share their experiences and help each other through their struggles with cancer.

Cancer Connections was initially developed as a Drupal 6 site, and was built in a relatively organic fashion; different components were added as they were needed, and there wasn’t particularly a plan in mind. The result was a functional, but confusing site. People could post discussions in several different places without there being a common context, it was hard to navigate, and it was difficult to know how to get started. Nevertheless, a community developed around the site and grew over its years of operation.

In 2012, Cancer Council NSW started to re-develop the site, with a few major goals in mind:

• Making grouping of discussions clearer
• Increasing the number of groups without increasing complexity
• Refocusing the site’s main paradigm around groups
• Simplifying use, and taking the site mobile

To accomplish these goals, the Drupal Commons distribution was chosen as a base for the site, even though its Drupal 7 version was not complete at the time. Commons’ base on Organic Groups made it a great place to start, but we soon had to learn to develop in a different way to develop in parallel with the project.

Some interesting challenges were presented in the form of managing configuration, balancing core aims and desires with those of the Commons project, and attempting to find ways of contributing back. Moreover, we were working in the open on a site which the users have very specific needs for, and it needed to be ready quickly.

In this presentation we will examine how the site turned out, how we collaborated with the Commons project during the build, and reveal the lessons we learnt. In particular, Felix Ratcliffe from Cancer Council NSW will discuss his experiences working with the unfamiliar development process this entailed.