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Change can often be a hard thing for groups—even progressive groups.  Getting a staff team to willingly adopt new software or a new website can be challenging.  Especially for staff who always feel a shortage of time in getting the important work done.

A current project we're working on at Chocolate Lily involves upgrading a Drupal 6 site to use the Drupal 7 Open Outreach distribution. It's the first time we've used a Drupal distribution for an existing Drupal site instead of a new one.

What is Drupal good for? Drupal is often used for creating complex organizational websites that might take weeks or months to develop from initial plans to launch. But what if you need a site, like, tomorrow?

Any way you do it, upgrading an organizational website to a new major version of Drupal - for example, from Drupal 5 or 6 to Drupal 7 - is a significant task.

Get as much as you can out of existing solutions. Often, this means adjusting expectations or adopting different solutions for the same problems.

What’s new with the Open Outreach distribution for nonprofits? Lots! There are now over 250 sites using Open Outreach. After working on getting this distribution up and running for so long, it's gratifying to see that it's starting to build some momentum.

In a recent blog post, Drupal 8 co-maintainer Alex Pott highlighted a seismic shift in Drupal that's mostly slipped under the radar. In Drupal 8, he wrote, "sites own their configuration, not modules".

This is part two of a series on configuration management challenges in Durpal 8. Part 1 looked at challenges for small sites and distriubtions.

As part of a long-term collaborative partnership with the University of Victoria's Geography Department, Chocolate Lily has been working on producing a customized version of Open Outreach suitable for community mapping.