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?

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. Having worked on my share of hairy Drupal upgrade projects, I went into this project with a fair bit of apprehension.

But I've been pleasantly surprised. The basic upgrade process was relatively quick and painless.

As we went I wrote up some notes on how to upgrade an existing site to Open Outreach. Here I'll generecize that a bit to answer the question: how do you upgrade an existing site to use a Drupal distribution?

As the first few organizations start to try out our Open Outreach distribution, I'm realizing there's a lot to figure out as you build a distribution-based site. Like how much should you customize the site versus taking it as it is? And how do updates and upgrades work? So here are a few pointers. If you have more, please leave comments below.

The first maybe obvious point to realize is just that building a site off a Drupal distribution, especially one that provides a lot of out of the box functionality, is different in important ways from building a site "from scratch" by downloading Drupal core and then adding modules and configuring. Customizing works differently. Updates work differently. So there are some important questions to think through at the start.

Open Outreach is a Drupal 7 distribution designed to provide a web solution that small and medium sized nonprofits can just turn on and start using. Today we rolled the beta5 release, which takes some major steps forward in terms of usability while catching up with the latest progress in Media module. We also have a new project website at openoutreach.org, with a growing collection of screencast tutorials on installing and using the distribution.

If you're looking for a leg up in building out nonprofit sites, now's a good time to download Open Outreach and run it through its paces. And if you're a Drupal shop or developer looking to partner in building a great distribution for nonprofits, now's a perfect time to join in.

Sooner or later most site developers are going to want to include related content--the articles most relevant to the content being viewed. Here are some quick notes on approaches to related content in Drupal 7.

Inferred or curated relationships?

The first distinction to make is between two types of related content.

1. Curated relationships that are directly designated by site administrators.
2. Inferred relationships that can be determined from available information.

We have recently developed two new Debut Features that are now posted on drupal.org.

The first, Debut WYSIWYG, provides configuration for WYSIWYG editing and accompanying input formats.

It includes:

• Three input formats: WYSIWYG public, WYSIWYG contributor, and WYSIWYG editor.
• A WYSIWYG module profile for each of the input formats, including edit buttons designed to meet the common editing needs of users with varying roles.