Drupal Distributions! We know and love Commons, Open Atrium, Open Publish, COD and other off the shelf projects. But what about your organization’s unique needs and use cases? You want to stop building websites and start building a repeatable system of your own. But how?

In this talk I share lessons learned from my time in Drupal consulting, including a one year engagement at a major publisher to establish a common platform for their 30+ unique web properties. I want attendees to walk away with a vision to move from site building and into internal product development. For attendees already on this path I want to share lessons from my time in the trenches.

Specific takeaways:

• How to get off the site building treadmill and into developing a product. “We don’t have the time” will no longer be an excuse.
• How to deal with inconsistencies between sites. Decide what should be unique vs. what should be standardized.
• Your love/hate relationship with Features (for example, how to deal with feature overrides).
• How to deal with tricky upgrade path issues as your platform matures.