Acquia Grows with Drupal and Introduces Drupal Gardens
by Bill Ives
I first spoke with Acquia as they were beginning to offer support services for the Drupal social publishing system (see: Acquia Makes Drupal Community Building Accessible). Recently, I spoke with Bryan House on their progress over the past six quarters. He said that the Drupal community has grown from 300,000 members to 600,000 during this time. Acquia provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal and it has also grown along with this Drupal community expansion. They now have 450 companies signed up. Customers include: Economist, InfoWorld, TNT, TechTarget, Washington State University, Emory University, and University of North Texas.
Bryan said that they have gotten especially good traction in the media and entertainment, education, and government sectors as you can also see above. This makes sense given Drupal’s combination of low cost and comprehensive features. The US White House has now adopted Drupal and Acquia is helping with this effort. Here is a blog post from Acquia founder and creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, on the White House move.
Other Acquia examples include Florida Hospital that has adopted Drupal for both internal collaboration and to run the web site of each of its seven hospitals. Acquia also has 140 business partners. Bryan said these are mostly web design firms. However, they are now getting a lot of interest from the large global systems integrators.
Acquia has three offerings. First, they offer annual support for Drupal 6. They also offer Drupal hosting so you can have one stop support for all Drupal needs. Their newest product is Drupal Gardens. It is a SaaS-based tool that allows you to quickly and easily build a Drupal website. Drupal Gardens allows a non-developer to take advantage of social publishing as Acquia has simplified the startup process. Acquia’s slogan for this is: “designed and online in 15 minutes.”
Acquia built Drupal Gardens on Drupal 7, which is currently in Alpha, because of its advanced features and increased usability. Examples of this includes: overlay menus for editing, one click editing, personalized short cuts, and customized menu bars. Drupal Gardens also includes a WYSWYG editor, personal media library, tagging and other metadata, and multiple authors. You can export your entire Drupal Gardens site, including users, content and theme, if you want to implement more advanced features.
Drupal Gardens is built to primarily support micro-sites. Large complex sites should use Drupal. Use cases include artist and events sites in entertainment, department and professor sites in higher education, responses to topics of interest and emergencies for government. It is especially useful when you want to maintain a consistency across the micro-sites. This is a nice addition to the Acquia product suite and a natural extension of its support services.
