IBM developerWorks has started a series of articles detailing what's involved with planning and implementing a fully featured community website - using Drupal.
It's a pretty good read (so far) and touches on issues that aren't unique to Drupal. But, it's nice to see Drupal getting some Big Corporate Loving™
Much of the articles are spent describing necessary customization for making Drupal sites behave nicely. Dries Buytaert (the lead of the Drupal project) hints that good news is in the works...
The second article, "Design for an effective user experience" is a good overview of the process that every website should go through. Defining purpose, audience, roles, personas, etc... So many websites skip this, and result in PR-driven shovelware...