Acquia Drupal Released with Partnership Opportunities for Developers
The Acquia Drupal distribution was released last week along with a new theme called Acquia Marina. After spending the last week working with both designing a new site for a client, I would summarize the situation by saying there are really only “two clicks” worth of difference between Drupal 6.x and Acquia Drupal. Those two clicks enable or disable two modules known as “Acquia Agent” and “Acquia Site Information”. Installing the site, you see the Acquia logo rather than the familiar Drupal “drop” avatar through the first stages of the process, and then the profile defaults to a set-up with the two Acquia modules enabled. The modules encourage you to register your site with Acquia for tech support and automatic update information. Turning these modules off defaults the site to a standard D6 install with around 20 extra modules already included. This can save some time in configuring a new site, as you don’t have to search, download, and upload again the 3rd party module files. Otherwise, there isn’t anything particularly dramatic or unexpected in this new release.
With regards to the Acquia modules, the quick details from the admin panel are:
Acquia Agent 1.0.0-ISR
“Allows Drupal to securely communicate with the Acquia Network, and checks for updates to Acquia Drupal.”
Acquia Site Information 1.0.0-ISR
“Sends a site profile including Acquia Drupal version, platform and module information; number of posts, comments and users; as well as file hashes and file meta-information on files in the system to the Acquia Network to facilitate support and update notifications.”
The result is a display panel in the admin section on every page that encourages you to register with Acquia for support services:
“Please enter your Acquia Network subscription keys on the settings page. Complete your Drupal experience. Subscribe to the Acquia Network to:
- Contact dedicated Drupal support professionals.
- Access your operations dashboard integrated across multiple Drupal sites.
- Assign and manage tasks across distributed website teams.
- Extend your Drupal sites with cloud-based services.
To learn more, visit the Acquia Network Services overview page.”
In visiting the Acquia Network Services page, you are encouraged to sign up for a “subscription”. There is a free offer for a single server site, “community,” while the cost for other subscriptions runs $500 to $3200 for a “standard” subscription, $1900 to $10,000 for a “professional” subscription, and $4300 to $20,000 for an “enterprise” subscription. There is also an “elite” service where the prices are not listed. What does this include?
With the free “community” subscription and the “standard,” you get access to the documentation library, update notifications, uptime monitoring, code modification detection, and remote cron activation. There is also a limited version of Mollom anti-spam included. You are basically restricted to the forums for support requests at these levels of participation. With the “standard” subscription you also buy tech support for installation, configuration, and other problems via email.
With the “pro” and “elite” subscriptions, you can buy quicker tech support services that include phone support. With a pro account, you should receive a response within 6 hours and with elite within 2 hours, compared to a 2 day lag with a standard account. The two advanced accounts include up to 8 hours of “advisory” support per year, which includes advice on module selection, module development, security best practices, performance, and architecture. 24/7 tech support is a $10,000 upgrade per year, but is included with elite accounts.
Pre-release, the major spin on the Acquia installation profile was that it would be a way to market Drupal tech support services to a Fortune 5000 crowd, major corporate clients. I think it will be successful in that, and Acquia should have a bright immediate future, considering the concentration of Drupal development talent that is involved with the company. For the majority of web designers and people using Drupal for their websites, I don’t think the subscription option is going to be something they choose. Nevertheless, using the “two clicks” option, they can use all or most of the tools included with the Acquia profile for free, and forgo the paid tech support services. This is the best of both worlds.
The Acquia Marina theme was released independently of the Acquia Drupal download on the drupal.org site. It is a nice theme with a tab-based drop down menu structure, a three part preface region above the content, and 15 defined regions overall, as well as a nice color scheme. The Acquia Marina theme has an advanced feature in the configuration section where you can adjust the settings for pages, breadcrumbs, and display that I haven’t seen on other themes yet. I put it through a lot of modifications with CSS, and ran into a few problems with icon support in the navigation on the right side, a z-index nightmare with transparent images and the drop down menu, and some cross-browser display issues. Nevertheless, it has already become one of the most popular themes for Drupal within the user community.
To take full advantage of the Acquia Drupal release, it looks like it is necessary for developers to partner with the company. Acquia has been organizing a series of webinars to promote these partnerships, stating:
“The Acquia Partner Program has been designed to accommodate Drupal service providers of every size - from sole practitioners to development shops large and small. If you offer Drupal services, I’d love for you to attend the webinar and join firms like Raincity Studios, Mediacurrent, Cyrve, Linnovate, and Charles River Web in the Acquia Partner Program.”
“This event will provide an in-depth overview of the Acquia Partner program. If your organization designs, builds and/or implements Drupal solutions for third party clients, then I encourage you to attend and learn about how Acquia can work with you to grow the market for Drupal solution offerings.”
Rather than changing the Drupal CMS, the Acquia distribution seems more intended to enhance the way people develop, collaborate, and maintain websites built on the platform, and to create a more marketable business model for these services. It should nevertheless become a standard way of working with Drupal for designers looking to save time in setting up a site, and I hope it leads to more installation profiles created with the same professionalism targeting unique implementation solutions.
For those who would like to try out Acquia Drupal, the files can be downloaded at:
Acquia Drupal:
Related - The Acquia Marina Theme:
http://drupal.org/project/acquia_marina
Modules Included with the Acquia Drupal Distribution:
- acquia_agent
- acquia_spi
- admin_menu
- advanced_help
- cck
- filefield
- fivestar
- google_analytics
- image
- imageapi
- imagecache
- imagefield
- markdown
- mollom
- pathauto
- tagadelic
- token
- views
- votingapi
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