October 27thAcquia’s Friendlier Version of Drupal: Early Reviews Coming Mixed
Alex
Open-source project Drupal has long been praised as an extremely flexible, robust and extensible CMS. Big organizations such as Federal Express have built their entire Web presence on top of Drupal (note; a company I work for, SproutBuilder, has tightly integrated Drupal with its Web application software). Drupal has had a reputation, alas, as also being very complex and better suited for organizations with serious tech chops. As a CMS noob, I was intrigued to read that a company launched by key Drupal visionary Dries Buytaert would be launching a new company called Acquia that aimed to make Drupal out-of-the-box easy like WordPress and Moveable Type, among others. Early reviews are starting to come in. No one says its not easy to use. InfoWorld gave it solid reviews, with reviewer saying he was able to launch a very professional looking site with full Drupal functionality in 1.5 days (that’s kinda scary for people used to having WP up and running in like an hour). Blogger and heavy Drupal user Hugh Durkin said it was kind slow and unwieldy in the Acquia version. What’s your take on Acquia? Let us know. We’re watching it very closely.
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Open-source project Drupal has long been praised as an extremely flexible, robust and extensible CMS. Big organizations such as Federal Express have built their entire Web presence on top of Drupal (note; a company I work for, SproutBuilder, has tightly integrated Drupal with its Web application software). Drupal has had a reputation, alas, as also being very complex and better suited for organizations with serious tech chops. As a CMS noob, I was intrigued to read that a company launched by key Drupal visionary Dries Buytaert would be launching a new company called Acquia that aimed to make Drupal out-of-the-box easy like WordPress and Moveable Type, among others. Early reviews are starting to come in. No one says its not easy to use. InfoWorld gave it solid reviews, with reviewer saying he was able to launch a very professional looking site with full Drupal functionality in 1.5 days (that’s kinda scary for people used to having WP up and running in like an hour). Blogger and heavy Drupal user Hugh Durkin said it was kind slow and unwieldy in the Acquia version. What’s your take on Acquia? Let us know. We’re watching it very closely.
Hi there. I think Mike at Infoworld was installing an entire LAMP environment from scratch and then installing Acquia Drupal on top of it. Even then, we were surprised that it took 1.5 days for him to get up and running. It no doubt would have taken him even longer if he hadn’t had Acquia Drupal, which installs with all the most common modules in one package.
One of the things we’re working on right now is a stack installer for Acquia Drupal that will lay down a full xAMP stack, including Acquia Drupal with a pre-configured database. This will dramatically accelerate the installation process for most people.
Be sure to check out the Acquia Drupal roadmap at:
http://acquia.com/community/projects/acquia-drupal-roadmap
November 1st, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Jeff, thanks for commenting. What you are saying makes total sense. Keep us posted on when the stack installer goes live and, equally importantly, when partners can offer one-click installs of Drupal on hosting / co-lo providers.
November 13th, 2008 at 1:30 am
I admire any and all attempts to improve the usability of Drupal but have yet to see any CMS that’s easier for the non-teckie to use than plain HTML is. People need to be educated to understand that basic html and basic CSS (particularly with 3 breathing down our necks) is easier to learn and implement than many a CMS. You’ll have your tricky bits and particularly with ecommerce, where attestable security is an essential, you’ll need to be getting in a pro. But the everyday stuff, the heart of most web sites, is basic. Shame more people don’t understand that.
I dunno if I’m allowed to link back to my site in comments from here but I expand on this theme here CMS & SEO at some length!
BB
August 7th, 2009 at 5:32 am
@Bill Kruse: I went and read your CMS and SEO doc and am VERY puzzled. First of all, none of the items you listed are an issue in any of the best open-source CMS systems. For instance, one totally can manage SEO relevant assets like Titles and H1 in these apps…easily, without any coding. It is actually a lot harder to learn HTML and CSS than to run basic admin in Drupal. And anyway, for an individual, or small company/org., to develop the same modular functionality of an open source community would take literally millions of dollars. That is why none of the important CMS products is for profit…too many human hours have been donated. I think your thesis is not supported by facts and is actually doing a disservice to people out there who want to get involved in social networks that are scoped to their needs.
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April 15th, 2011 at 7:37 am
Acquia is a fraud!
We had a Professional level account with them and received virtually no support. In the first two weeks they were offline for 36 hours due to system failures. It seems that they use free hosting services from others then charge their customers to use these free services. When we asked to reduce our account to a lower level in keeping with their support capabilities they unilaterally cancelled our account.
They offer free site building as a ploy to get people to subscribe at which time you discover that they are actually a bait and switch operation.
Stay as far away as possible from Acquia and Drupal Gardens.
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November 10th, 2011 at 4:09 pm
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December 7th, 2011 at 6:08 am