Acquia: Commercially supported Drupal

Posted by admin

October 1, 2008

When it comes to choosing a content management system (CMS), the open-source Drupal is often a great choice for large or content-rich sites, because it scales well, supports multiple authors and is thoroughly customizable. The downside of all of this power is that for new users especially, the learning curve can be pretty steep. Although Drupal 6 was a huge step forward in overall usability, from a web admin perspective, it’s still not exactly easy.

Acquia, a company founded by Drupal creator and project lead Dries Buytaert, has just launched Acquia Drupal, which packages Drupal and some of the most popular and highly rated community modules together and also offers commercial support. This is a big win for both Drupal and current and future Drupal users.

Acquia Drupal is a free GPL-licensed download. It contains the Drupal 6.x core (currently at 6.4), a bunch of community contributed modules, like Google Analytics, Mollom (Dries’s spam-fighting content solution), and rating and image gallery tools. I installed Acquia Drupal on my local test server and also installed the latest Drupal release, 6.4. The install process was already easier with Acquia Drupal, because I didn’t have to create a settings.php file in advance before filling in my database details. The additional modules also made for a nicer user interface (see screenshot) and contained an additional site theme.

The real power of Acquia Drupal for businesses is in its commercial support. When I’m developing websites for clients, I always have to keep future tech support in mind. If I’m not going to providing future support, I need to make sure that they can get support quickly and easily somewhere else. I’ve also been in situations where I have stepped into existing sites, and wading through the code to figure out what has been modified and what version of an ope source platform that site is using can be really, really painful. That’s the benefit of using a commercial content management system like ExpressionEngine or Movable Type (Movable Type is also available in an open source community version), if the client needs support, they have someone to contact - and if I need to try to figure something out, I can talk to someone and look at an actual roadmap to figure out what is going on.

Acquia is aiming at bringing those benefits to Drupal. The Acquia Drupal package also includes modules that connect to the Acquia Network. The Acquia Network offers tiered support in yearly subscription packages. The Community subscription (which is free through December 31, 2008 and $200 a year after that), for instance, offers access to the Acquia subscriber forums. The higher tiered plans offer phone, web and e-mail support. The Acquia Network modules let the user conenct directly to support and also let support have a better idea of what is going on. This also means that things like uptime monitoring, code modification detection and remote cron activation can all be tracked and performed.

Certainly attaching paid services and support to an open source project is nothing new. Automattic offers paid solutions and support for WordPress.com , in addition to being the main contributors to the WordPress.org project. Still, this is a really innovative way to market support, while also making the actual product open source and GPL.

If you have considered using Drupal for a project but were afraid of the learning curve and potential support hurdles, check out Acquia.

[via Mashable]

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