4 years of Thunder: 10 lessons learned

When the German publishing house Hubert Burda Media started building a Drupal distribution in 2016, this was meant to be our internal answer to a growing portfolio and diversifying requirements. Meanwhile, numerous websites run on Thunder, and not only traditional publishers. Thunder has become the distribution for professional publishing.

At DrupalCon Europe 2020, Julia explained Burda’s motivation to share Thunder with not only competitors but with everyone who publishes content. She talked about the challenges we faced along the journey and the benefits we reaped. Watch the session here:

The session starts with an overview of Thunder's history: why a Drupal distribution was the best solution for a large publishing house like Burda and why we then decided to go open-source. Julia then shares ten lessons she and her team have learned over the years. These include change management, project organization and technical solutions - and of course the Drupal community. Because the biggest advantage of an open source project like Thunder - and the reason why we are more determined than ever to contribute to Drupal - is the huge community behind the software.