Drupal "distros" have been around for years, but best practices around building and maintaining them have been slow to evolve. Too often, they're used as a time-saver for getting started but become something that just gets in the way as site building advances.

When done right, however, a distribution can be the heart of a products-based business built on Drupal. And sites built on well-architected and well-maintained distributions can become part of an ecosystem that passes new innovation around for the benefit of all.

NuCivic is the company behind DKAN, an award-winning distribution that provides a turn-key Open Data publishing platform. In this session we will review some of the best and worst practices we've encountered while creating DKAN. Some specific items include:

• Automated testing (simpletest and behat using Travis CI and Jenkins)
• Managing make files across projects
• Publishing to Pantheon, Acquia and Amazon Web Services, for one-click spin-ups
• Managing upstream/downstream changes in individual instances of distributions, using the BuildManager Drush extension
• Our process in creating NuCivic Data, an OpenSaaS (open-source software-as-a-service) product built on DKAN, in partnership with Acquia