Many people have complained about Drupal’s core search functionality over the years, but the server requirements behind Solr and Lucene require a Java extension that most people are not equipped to manage on their existing IT architecture, staff, or budget. So Acquia is offering these search functionalities as SaaS, or Software as a Service on a remote-hosted, pre-configured basis. If you want to do it yourself, see:
http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solr

According to Dries:

“Acquia Search is included for no additional cost in every Acquia Network subscription. Basic and Professional subscribers have one ‘search slice’ and Enterprise subscribers have five ‘search slices’. A slice includes the processing power to index your site, to do index updates, to store your index, and to process your site visitors’ search queries. Each slice includes 10MB of indexing space – enough for a site with between 1,000 and 2,000 nodes. Customers who exceed the level included with their subscription may purchase additional slices. A ten-slice extension package costs an additional $1,000/year, and will cover an additional 10,000 – 20,000 nodes in an index of 100MB. For my personal blog, which has about 900 nodes at the time of this writing, a Basic Acquia Network subscription ($349 USD/year) would give me all the benefits of Acquia Search, plus all the other Acquia Network services.”

Put in this perspective, most Drupal users likely won’t be switching to Acquia Search anytime soon. But, for the most part… they have little need to. For small sites or social networks, Drupal’s core search is going to be generally sufficient. Drupal will index your site automatically on cron runs, and keep this index of keywords and nodes in a table of your MySQL database. If you are working a lot with taxonomy and CCK fields, then Faceted Search is a recommended choice: http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search

I have used Faceted Search on a number of sites and it is excellent for building a custom search engine around your site’s own custom vocabularies, hierarchies, and site structures. Faceted Search is also important in a number of Semantic Web integrations working with RDF data and other micro-tags attached to data fields. Acquia Search is designed to work in this way as well as to facilitate the number crunching involved when high traffic sites with extremely large databases of content need to sift through search archives quickly to return results from user queries. Consider the example of Drupal.org in this context – Acquia Search is the solution to managing over 500,000 nodes and millions of search queries on an extremely active site.

“Reality is that for a certain class of websites — like intranets or e-commerce websites — search can be the most important feature of the entire site. Faceted search can really increase your conversions if you have an e-commerce website, or can really boost the productivity of your employees if you have a large intranet. For those organizations, Drupal’s built in search is simply not adequate. We invested in search because we believe that for many of these sites, enterprise-grade search is a requirement… The search module shipped with Drupal core has its purpose and target audience. It isn’t right for everyone, just as Acquia Search is not for everyone. Both are important, not just for the Drupal community at large, but also for many of Acquia’s own customers. Regardless, there is no question that we need to keep investing and improving Drupal’s built-in search.”

In summary, Acquia Search is mostly targeted at enterprise level Drupal users with extremely large databases and high traffic, and is a cloud based solution that should not only speed up the rate of return on results, it should also improve the quality of the material returned based on faceted keywords & vocabularies. For those using Acquia’s personal or small business subscription accounts, the new search should appear as an additional “free bonus” with your monthly package of services. For users, even on a small site, the efficiency of faceted search may make information more accessible for visitors.

To learn more, visit: http://buytaert.net/acquia-search-benefits-for-visitors

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Acquia Launches Cloud-based Solr Search Indexing

The article reports that the development team behind Acquia, which includes Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, had concerns about how the open source community would view a commercial Drupal development company and enterprise release of the CMS, and the PR campaign was designed to smooth this over.

“Drupal, a social publishing system with a vibrant, passionate open source community of more than 350,000 members, is the platform for many well-known company and educational institution websites. Acquia was launched with the mission to increase enterprise adoption of Drupal by providing enterprise-level functionality and support to the open source technology.”

“Citigate Cunningham recognized that a successful launch would require the delicate balance of generating substantial buzz around the company and its offerings, while remaining sensitive to the Drupal and open source community’s concerns about how a commercial company would impact the Drupal open source project. The agency leveraged Acquia Co-Founder and CTO Dries Buytaert, the original Drupal creator, as an evangelist, community advocate, and open source celebrity, and designed a three-stage strategic PR approach that would build trust within the Drupal community, drive demand for Acquia in a beta launch, and finally bridge the gap perceived by the enterprise community as part of the general availability launch.”

“To accomplish its goal, the team targeted both social and traditional media outlets including business press, technology trades, Web 2.0 blogs, and influential analysts frequently quoted in the press. Additionally, the agency raised Buytaert’s profile by securing high profile coverage, awards, and speaking engagements that served to seed confidence within the open source ecosystem.”

Citigate Cunningham’s other clients include eTrade, Sprint, Cisco, HCL, OPSource, AliBaba, and other Silicon Valley & international IT firms. According to their site, “In enterprise technology, we have represented some of the biggest software and hardware brands in business applications, security, mobility, telecommunications, semiconductors, systems, IT services and high performance computing. We have also represented some of the coolest consumer tech companies in digital marketing, digital media and entertainment, consumer electronics, social media and eCommerce. Market segments we’ve penetrated include financial services, healthcare, government, education/academia, energy and manufacturing.”

“We’re very proud to have been recognized as a finalist for the SABRE Awards,” said Gary Thompson, chairman of Citigate Cunningham. “Because Acquia offers commercial support for the well-known Drupal open source project, we had a built-in audience for our launch. Our biggest challenge was to reach beyond the Drupal community and expand the reach of the Acquia story into the enterprise market.”

All in all, this can be seen as a pragmatic move by Acquia, contracting an industry leading PR firm to manage the launch of their brand internationally. Many people outside of the PR industry will undoubtedly feel a bit cynical when reading the inside language of public relations strategy, and few really investigate the way these PR firms hype the companies and products that they promote into news stories,”buzz”, and spin that most people take as legitimate news but may be little different in content than a paid corporate “info-mercial”.

Nevertheless, it is easy to see the risk involved in not getting it right at the time of start up (“cuil”), and the fact that everything has gone so well for Acquia since their launch has definitely earned Citigate Cunningham a lot of support & respect. The fact that Acquia has a great product and team to promote has undoubtedly made the process much easier.

Acquia and the Drupal development team have shown great attention to the small details across all aspects of the project that are a symbol of professionalism in open source, and the PR campaign surrounding the launch of Acquia is another example of that. But for most users, “a strategic PR campaign to build trust” and “seed confidence” is only going to work when the PR campaign itself disappears into the background noise.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Citigate Cunningham Nominated for 2008 Gold SABRE Award for Acquia Public Relations

“What if there was software with the elegance and extensibility of WordPress but all the features you’ve come to expect from social networks like Facebook? Now there is: check out BuddyPress. BuddyPress is an official sister project of WordPress. The idea behind it was to see what would happen to the web if it was as easy for anyone to create a social network as it is to create a blog today. There’s been an explosion of social activity on the web, it’s probably the most important trend of the past few years, but there’s been a dearth of Open Source tools that enable the social web. In WordPress we have a robust and extensible base that can scale to many millions of users, and BuddyPress is essentially a set of plugins on top of WordPress that add private messaging, profiles, friends, groups, activity streams, and everything else you’ve come to expect from your favorite social network, like a Facebook-in-a-box.”

To take a look at the BuddyPress demo site, visit: http://testbp.org/

BuddyPress includes user profiles, private messaging, friends / buddylists, groups, activity streams, a wall / stream like section called “the wire” for status updates and tweet-like on-site micro-blogging, in addition to multi-user blogs and forums. I use this same profile quite a lot in building social networks with Drupal using Panels, Advanced Profile Kit, Buddylist, Private Message, Flag, Activity Stream, Views, CCK, Content Profile / Bio, Organic Groups, and other modules. Because of the multiple development teams managing the combination of modules needed to build the working equivalent of this in Drupal, and the 5.x / 6.x / 7.x development cycle variations + all the time assembling, theming, and debugging a social network install in Drupal… the out of the box offering from BuddyPress will be a strong challenge.

For examples of sites that have been built with BuddyPress, see:

Sample demo profile page: http://testbp.org/members/galen/

WannaNetwork – Online Real Estate Community: http://wannanetwork.com/

Flokka – Women in Business: http://flokka.com/

GrungePress – Online Music Community: http://grungepress.com/

Working daily with both WordPress and Drupal both for web publishing and building social networks for clients, I have long felt WordPress had many advantages for single user blogs (really nice themes, for example) vs. Drupal, but lacked the module expandability to allow the construction of social networks. BuddyPress completely changes that and offers out of the box what is very challenging to build in Drupal. It could save 2 to 3 weeks development time on a complex social network site, and allowing the designer to focus work on the theme and content rather than building the module architecture.

My hope is that Acquia (or another company or developer) will release a “social network” installation profile for Drupal that is similar to this. Despite the large number of social networks built with Drupal, I don’t think there has been anything close to an “official” social networking profile like BuddyPress. One reason for this – and it may be related to the release of BuddyPress as a “sister project” rather than just a collection of modules that plugin to WordPress, is to create a complex social network site that deploys on an installation profile you need to install in a way that the database is pre-populated with all the correct settings, permissions, and everything is automatically positioned in the site by block, section, menu, etc. To do this in Drupal, you basically have to include a mySQL database map with the installation profile – something that I also haven’t seen often, but we are working on at TypeHost. Then you have to have a GUI layer that makes it easy for the user to transform the archetypal site structure into a personal site. From the way it looks, Automattic has done this perfectly with BuddyPress.

In terms of branding, the name is not the absolute best choice here in my opinion, but there must have been a clear reasoning behind not just releasing it as another version of WordPress, like “WordPress – SN (Social Network)” vs. “WordPress (Blog or Standard version).” Also it is interesting that the projects seem to be on independent / co-dependent / inter-related development paths, but that BuddyPress is not being considered “the next” version of WordPress. Again, similar to Drupal, there is some decision making that sees these not as “core” modules – despite the fact that many people see them as core to the functionality of the CMS. WordPress functioning as a full social network may not be needed by the majority of single user blog publishers who use the CMS as a platform, but this release is going to make a big difference on the web. It will be interesting to chart the usership statistics of BuddyPress vs. WordPress over the next year to see how many sites adopt the new changes.

Summary: combined with WordPress themes and publishing ease, the addition of full social network functionality to the platform with the release of BuddyPress 1.0 is a slam dunk / home run for Automattic, bloggers, traditional WordPress users, and social network developers. Look to see this on even more websites than WordPress in the future, and to pull a lot of development away from Drupal, which still lacks a unified offering that builds a social network as simply and easily as BuddyPress.

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Automattic releases BuddyPress – Official “Sister Project” to WordPress

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:

http://acquia.com/downloads

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
• print
• tagadelic
• token
• views
• votingapi

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Acquia Drupal Released with Partnership Opportunities for Developers

Acquia - Value-added software products and services for the Drupal

One project that is generating a lot of buzz throughout the Drupal development community is the upcoming release of “Carbon”. Carbon is the first “commercially supported” release of Drupal from Acquia, a start-up company launched by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert. According to the Acquia website, “The Carbon distribution will include the Drupal 6 core release and essential extension modules for rapidly assembling compelling social publishing sites and applications.” The main goal of Carbon will be to provide a professional support network for Drupal to further its penetration into the corporate environment. But what new features will it include, how will it be priced, and what effect will it have on the Open Source development community? These questions remain unanswered though Carbon is slated for release, possibly within the month.

Drupal & Corporate Web Development:

Drupal already has a strong presence in corporate website development, particularly is the music industry. The list of top clients using Drupal for their websites includes:

• SonyBMG
• Warner Brothers Records
• New York Observer
• Forbes
• The Onion
• Harvard University
• Amnesty International

Boris Mann, who works with Bryght and Raincity Studios providing Drupal web design and dedicated hosting solutions, makes the point that this success has come even as no businesses are currently marketing Drupal to top level corporations. He writes, “Acquia, with its funding, business model, and approach, will be/is focused on delivering to the Global Fortune 1000 / Fortune 10000 enterprise customer … most of whom have never heard of Drupal at the CxO level.” Acquia will be offering certifications to developers who want to offer industry standards or benchmarks to their clients as a proof their skills in order to attract a higher salary. In addition to this, they will be providing full technical support for the CMS to clients who purchase the Carbon license.

The End of Open Source?

Many users worry that this development spells the end of Drupal as an open source software platform. With a commercial version available, the reasoning goes, developers will migrate to support paid and proprietary solutions, neglecting the community that gave birth to Drupal. Some suggest Drupal could start down a path of paid modules and plug-ins similar to that that which revolves around the Joomla CMS, something that has largely been absent from Drupal except for in the realm of theme development. However, such worries if often voiced remain unfounded. Plans are currently underway to transfer the Drupal trademark to the non-profit Drupal Association for long-term management. The GPL license is in no danger of being revoked, and even the new release of Carbon will be available for all users free of cost. It seems the only thing Acquia will be charging for is technical support and development assistance for clients who want to use the new version. Carbon will be more like an “installation profile” combining the Drupal core with a set of popular and reliable modules that is released together and supported by Acquia.

A Message from the Founder:

To put these fears to rest, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert posted the following statement on a thread at drupal.org discussing the release of Carbon:

Acquia is in the business of providing support. Carbon is a set of publicly available modules that we choose to provide support for. We can’t possibly support all modules, so we have to draw a circle around the modules that we will support. Carbon is that circle. Carbon will be GPL, and by design, everyone will be able to use and work with Carbon if they choose to do so. You don’t have to pay Acquia if you want to use Carbon — you only have to pay Acquia if you want Acquia to provide you support for Carbon. If you want to pay company ABC to provide you support for Carbon, that is allowed by all means. Furthermore, Acquia is developing Carbon on drupal.org … Acquia employees are actively contributing on d.o — both to core and to contributed modules. We’re an active participant in the Drupal community just like many other companies/people are. We submitted a good amount of patches and these patches, if accepted by their maintainers, will end up in both Carbon as well as the individual modules that you can download directly from drupal.org. I’ve been working on Drupal for many years and Acquia is my company. I know how Open Source works, I know the Drupal community inside out, I know how companies should work with the community, and I have no intention whatsoever to destroy my own child.”

Carbon – Pre Release Specs:

So if Carbon is no danger to the open source development community, and will be equally available and shared by all, what sets it apart other than its offer of technical support? As stated above, Carbon will be more of an installation profile, containing the Drupal core bundled together with modules and extensions that make it an optimal system for development purposes. How it will be themed remains a mystery, but preliminary reports are that it will include these modules:

• Page layout: Panels 2
• Custom content: CCK, Date, Imagefield, File
• Views: Views 2
• Lightweight markup: Marksmarty
• WYSIWYG: Kupu (Discuss WYSIWYG editors here)
• Scheduled publishing: Workflow, Actions
• Image management: As fields – Imagefield, Imagecache; As nodes – Image, Image assist
• Events: Calendar
• Forums: Forum
• Comment spam filter: Mollom
• Social bookmarks: TBD
• Content rating: Voting API, Fivestar
• Search: in core, ApacheSolr
• Categorization: in core
• RSS: in core
• Content aggregation: tbd
• Workflow: Workflow
• Content versioning: Core, Diff
• Tag clouds: Tagadelic
• SEO URLs: Pathauto
• Utilities: Primary Tag, Custom pager, JS Tools, Google Maps, Google Analytics, Wiki freelinks
• Import / migration: tbd
• Authentication: Persistent login, Securesite, LDAP, OpenID
• User Groups: Organic groups
• Email gateway: tbd
• Email notification: Subscriptions

The combination of Mollom (Anti-Spam) and Spokes (Automatic Update Alerts), both proprietary new developments from Acquia with the release makes Carbon all the more interesting. If all goes as planned, look for Carbon to give a huge boost to the Drupal community when it is released this fall, and spur another influx of new users to the CMS. The roll out of a customized, corporate-level release of this popular CMS directly from the office of its founder, and bringing all the best in Drupal modules created over years of development by thousands of coders into one package is sure to be a blockbuster. Look for an official release of Carbon somewhere between September and November of 2008.

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Acquia Gets Ready for Release of Carbon – Commercially Supported Drupal