Acquia Blog

Barry and I just met with a team from Northscale -- the startup formed to support and extend Memcached, the popular key-value cache used by the largest web sites. We learned about their new database project, Membase, and talked about how it could help high-volume Drupal sites including our Acquia Hosting customers.

Membase is built on the core Memcached technology and supports the Memcached API. I'm excited about what they've done to extend Memcached: Read full article »

The primary goal of DrupalGardens is to maximize Drupal adoption. Since Drupal adoption amongst developers is taking off like a rocket ship, we’ve focused the majority of our attention on site builders and designers. To succeed at attracting these types, Drupal—and the modules we’ve decided to include—need to be easy to use. Read full article »

This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform. Read full article »

I'd like to send out a warm welcome to one of our newest hires, Michael Walsh. Michael will be helping the company run, grow and manage our Public Sector business - both Program Management and Business Development. He also is responsible for opening our official field office in Washington, DC on Connecticut Avenue. With this move, and additional hires in the DC area , we feel confident that we will be able to better serve our customers and partners in this domain even more effectively. Read full article »

All you have to do is google “CEOs and blogging” and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about: more corporate and executive blogs than you can count. As a marketer, chances are you have your hands into some aspect of your businesses blog (s) or your executive team’s approach to blogging. Also likely is that sometime in the recent past or near future you have or will receive the call to ignite a better blogging campaign for your C-level executives. Read full article »

Today we’ve reached another important milestone at Acquia: Drupal Gardens is now in open beta. No more beta codes. No more waiting to try the service. Now anyone can access Drupal Gardens and create a free Drupal 7 site! Read full article »

If you look at successful companies today, you’ll notice they all create novel or truly enjoyable experiences for their users. Apple delights users with incredible user interfaces, easy to use software, and technology that is interactive. Twitter created a new way for users to communicate, follow, and broadcast news. Facebook brought your life and friends online. Foursquare is a new way for store fronts to create loyalty programs while giving users a way to track, rate, and discover new places - socially. Gilt Group makes shopping online exciting and high end fashion a bit more affordable. Read full article »

The speed of light is, unfortunately, still a constant. If your Drupal site has users in San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo, Delhi, and Australia (and whose doesn't?), you've had no good way to give all of them fast access to your site. No matter where you put your master database server, most people have to cross an ocean to access it. Perhaps you can put read-only slave databases with local web servers in locations around the world, but then the remote users still have a long haul when they want to log in and create content---which is, after all, what your Drupal site is for.

I am experimenting with an approach to solving this problem that allows users to log in and create content using web and slave database servers that are geographically close to them while maintaining a single consistent Drupal site. It does not require multiple active database master servers and all the intractable problems that causes. My system, called Pipe Dream, intercepts database-changing operations at the remote locations and sends them over a message queue (a.k.a. a pipe) to the primary location where they are replayed. Read full article »

The hosting team at Acquia has been busy! While we continue to focus on making Acquia Hosting the most reliable and scalable Drupal hosting service anywhere, we've recently made significant enhancements to its usability and to the data we provide our customers. Read full article »

Hey folks,

Did you know that Drupal 7 will have a amazing multimedia capabilities due in large part to the Media module?

Hi, my name is Jacob Singh. Read full article »

Chapter Three have just completed the first public Acquia Drupal training in DC at the end of June. Acquia is rolling out content developed with Chapter Three covering the basics and essentials of Drupal.

By working with our partners, we can reach a broader audience. We can enable these subject matter experts to deliver high quality learning experiences with greater reach. If you'd like a Drupal training nearby you, we'd love to help out. Read full article »

There exists an interesting story about a man and a butterfly cocoon. It is about a man that found a cocoon, and brought it home to watch it turn into a butterfly. As the butterfly inside matured, it struggled to get out of its cocoon, but couldn't quite get free of it. One day, the man became tired of waiting and decided to help the butterfly. He removed the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly was pleased, but it had a swollen body and small, wrinkled wings. As a result, the butterfly never succeeded in flying and spent its entire life crawling around. Read full article »

We recently completed an Acquia customer case study on the New York Senate. The New York Senate is a great example of a Government agency that's using Drupal to keep it's constituents engaged and involved in happenings at the State Senate. Open Government and transparency at its best with Drupal. They use Microsites for various members of the Senate with their own messaging. Read full article »

In addition to the rush the Drupal Gardens team gets when adding cool new features, we like to get things right, striking a good balance between power and simplicity.  In the last sprint, we spent a bunch of time polishing the powerful XML Sitemap and Media modules with a focus on simplifying the UX and providing smart defaults so they work immediately after site creation.  Out of the box, these modules are highly customizable with many configuration settings.  Our goal was to red Read full article »

I really only want two things for my website: (1) I want the software that runs my website to be high-quality and (2) I want my website's content to be high-quality. It sounds easy and straight-forward but I assure you it isn't. Read full article »

We've been hard at work putting together web traffic reporting for all sites on Acquia Hosting, and it's now available in the Acquia Network subscription interface. These statistics provide a level of traffic detail across our hosting stack that is not available from other sources such as Google Analytics or log file analyzers like awstats, particularly, how many requests are being served from each layer of the Drupal and LAMP stack. We're also making available the fully expanded data behind these numbers as a CSV file download ready for import into your reporting tool of choice. Read full article »

About 20 months ago, at Acquia, we began working on a hosted offering for Apache Solr, an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Exactly one year ago, we launched it commercially as Acquia Search. Time and the public reaction have proven that we made the right choice. Read full article »

We have marked the one year anniversary of the our hosted search service by rolling out a significant update with new features and some fixes. This was released Wednesday night (June 30). Read full article »

SEO is a critical component of a succesful website.  It isn't a hack or a black art of the nefarious.  Instead, it's a vital business consideration. If your content is hard to find, no one is going to give it any notice. Read full article »

When we started planning Drupal Gardens 18 months ago one of our goals was to help break down the barriers to creating stunning Drupal web sites. To that end we developed the Drupal Gardens' ThemeBuilder -- to allow people to point and click to create uniquely designed web sites, even if they don't know what CSS is or don't have the time to learn Drupal 7's powerful theme system.