Acquia Ads New Components to the Acquia Network for Drupal Users
by Bill Ives
I have covered Acquia several times on this blog (for example, see Acquia Provides Drupal Commons to Support Open Source Enterprise Collaboration and Acquia Grows with Drupal and Introduces Drupal Gardens). It provides support, services, and enhancements to make your Drupal experience more productive. Recently, I spoke with Bryan House, VP of Marketing, about their latest moves. They include enhanced vision and proactive management of site configuration issues; self-guided training for Drupal concepts and best practices; site testing under a variety of traffic load conditions; and an internet marketing report specific to Drupal. These are all delivered through Acquia Network, a set of cloud services for Drupal developers and site managers.
We began with Acquia Insight. It provides Drupal site owners with a dynamic, real-time, at-a-glance view into their sites. It provides metrics for a wide variety of site elements to ensure they are up-to-date, secure, and performing well. Insight offers: identification and troubleshoots site problems in real time; audits of modules for code changes, and offers fixes; and recommendations for courses of action to address problems and resolve issues. It also instills Drupal best practices to reduce mistakes and eliminate errors.
Bryan showed me how it works. For example you can see an Insight rating of a Drupal site in the screen shot below. There are both issues that need fixes and suggestions on how to fix them, as well as resolved issues.
You also get popup alerts with suggestions for actions to resolve the issue. See screen shot below.
A dashboard can show you such metrics as your Insight score over time and scores on other issues such as the SEO Grader we will discuss next.
The SEO Grader was built with their business partner, Volacci. It provides an internet marketing review optimized for Drupal. SEO Grader capabilities include: confirmation of redirects and SEO-friendly URLs; analysis of page structure on such issues as “crawlability,” “findability,” and user experience, and best practices for SEO specific Drupal modules. You can see an SEO grader screen below with scores on five issues mentioned above. Iike Insight, the SEO Grader both indentifies problems and offers resolutions.
The Acquia Network also offers a number of third party tools in an aggregated basis. One is Blitz, powered by Mu Dynamics, a self-service load and performance-testing platform that enables developers to deploy high-performance websites with confidence. See my review of Blitiz – Mu Dynamics Brings Performance Testing to the Cloud and Mobile. Other tools include: Mollom spam blocking, New Relic performance optimization, Mobify mobile interface design suite, and Visual Website Optimizer A/B testing tool.
Acquia has also partnered with Drupalize.Me to offer their an extensive library of tutorial videos that speed the acquisition of Drupal skills. Drupalize.Me includes over 335 videos, totaling 149 hours of Drupal & jQuery training. In addition, Acquia is announcing the availability of the Acquia Apps Market in Q4, 2011, utilizing the Acquia Network API. The Acquia Apps Market allows software vendors and developers to offer their services and applications to the Drupal websites served by the Acquia Network.
This is quite a comprehensive array of services that addresses the needs of developers, site administrators, and business functions leaders. It nicely complements their other offerings in Drupal support and their Aquica library.
