Below will be comments regarding the current distribution setup:
1) The buddylist module should default to permissions already being set when the site administer turns it on.
2) The forum topic areas "general" and "site help" should be capitalized: "General" and "Site Help."
3) Urlfilter should be enabled and configured for use in the filtered HTML input format.
6) Create a Sample Block as demonstrated here.
5) files/theme_editor folder was not writable by the system.
6) Enable the "kill word on paste" option in htmlArea. No one want's Word HTML posted into a web page :)
7) Enable the tracker module. Most new CivicSpace admins would find this a useful feature.
8) Filtered HTML should allow b and i tags, too, since these are still very popular.
9) Include a sample category "Topics" applied to stories, or remove the information about it under "Creating and Posting Content."
10) Note that the first page of the configuration guide has been promoted to the front page so that it acts as the greeting.