Acquia Drupal Review

With all of the buzz encircling Acquia lately, we thought it prudent to share our Acquia Drupal review with our readers since we've never truly delved in to see what Acquia's rendition of Drupal is made of.

To get started, we decided to test the Acquia Drupal Installer stack which is available from the Acquia website and is a packaged of Apache, PHP, MySQL, PHPMyadmin and the Acquia Drupal version. The stack installer installs them all and allows you to quickly get to the nitty gritty and start playing.

The Install Process

To start with, we downloaded the latest stack from the Acquia website and launched the install process:

Here you can see the included modules for this installation. The release we are using is two days old so it's nice and fresh.

Now it's time to launch the stack and see if everything works as expected.

What the Acquia team have done here is include a large number of modules that integrate well and expand the functionality of Drupal which essentially gives you an almost complete Drupal installation with the most commonly used modules all preconfigured for your use. It also provides integration with the Acquia network which is not unlike the RHN that Redhat offers for it's linux distribution product line (well, same concept anyways).

The included modules are:

Standard Drupal 6.x Modules

Aggregator	Aggregates syndicated content (RSS, RDF, and Atom feeds).
Blog	Enables keeping easily and regularly updated user web pages or blogs.
Blog API	Allows users to post content using applications that support XML-RPC blog APIs.
Book	Allows users to structure site pages in a hierarchy or outline.
Comment	Allows users to comment on and discuss published content.
Contact	Enables the use of both personal and site-wide contact forms.
Content translation	Allows content to be translated into different languages.
Forum	Enables threaded discussions about general topics.
Menu	Allows administrators to customize the site navigation menu.
OpenID	Allows users to log into your site using OpenID.
Path	Allows users to rename URLs for improved SEO.
Poll	Allows your site to capture votes on different topics in the form of multiple choice questions.
Profile	Supports configurable user profiles.
Search	Enables site-wide keyword searching.
Statistics	Logs access statistics for your site.
Taxonomy	Enables the categorization of content.
Tracker	Enables tracking of recent posts for users.
Trigger	Enables actions to be fired on certain system events, such as when new content is created.

Community Modules

Administration Menu		Renders a menu tree for administrative purposes as dropdown menu at the top of window.
Advanced Help		Provides context sensitive online help for modules, including Views.
Calendar		Displays any Views or CCK date fields in calendar formats.
CCK (Content Construction Kit)		Enables the creation of custom content types without programming.
	Content	Allows administrators to define new content types.
	Content Copy	Enables ability to import/export field definitions.
	Content Permissions	Set field-level permissions for CCK fields.
	Date	Define date/time field type.
	Fieldgroup	Create field groups for CCK fields.
	Filefield	Defines a file field type.
	ImageField	Defines an image field type.
	Link	Defines a URL field type.
	Node Reference	Defines a field type for referencing one node from another.
	Number	Defines numeric field types.
	Option Widgets	Defines selection, check box and radio button widgets for text and numeric fields.
	Text	Defines simple text field types.
	User Reference	Defines a field type for referencing a user from a node.
Comment notify		Sends notification e-mails to visitors about new comments on pages where they have commented.
Fivestar		A simple five-star voting widget for nodes.
Google Analytics		Adds Google Analytics javascript tracking code to all your site's pages.
Image		Allows uploading, resizing and viewing of images.
	Image Attach	Allows easy attaching of image nodes to other content types.
	Image Gallery	Allows sorting and displaying of image galleries based on categories.
	Image Import	Allows batches of images to be imported from a directory on the server.
	ImageMagick Advanced Options	Adds advanced options to the ImageMagick image toolkit.
Image Assist		Enables users to upload and insert inline images into posts.
ImageAPI		Provides ImageAPI supporting multiple toolkits.
ImageCache		Allows you to dynamically manipulate and cache images.
Lightbox		Used to overlay images on the current page.
Markdown filter		Allows content to be submitted using Markdown syntax.
Mollom		Protects against comment and contact form spam.
Pathauto		Provides a mechanism for modules to automatically generate aliases for the content they manage.
Printer, e-mail and PDF versions		Generates printer-friendly and PDF versions of pages, and “send to a friend” email functionality.
Tagadelic		Makes weighted tag clouds from your taxonomy terms.
Token		Provides a shared API for replacement of textual placeholders with actual data.
Views		Create customized lists and queries from your database.
	Views Exporter	Allows exporting multiple views at once.
	Views UI	Administrative interface to create and edit views.
Voting API		Provides a shared voting API for other modules.
Webform		Enables creation of questionnaires, contact or request/register forms, surveys, and polls.

Acquia Network Modules

Acquia Agent	Allows Acquia Drupal to securely communicate with the Acquia Network and check for updates.
Acquia Site Information	Sends site profile including platform, module, and theme information to the Acquia Network to facilitate support and update notifications.

Acquia have also provided two great starter themes from TopNotchThemes that are included with their distribution.

Acquia is really designed to make the best use of Drupal and the Acquia Network which monitors the site, incorporates
spam protection functionality and incorporates Acquia Search functionality to the site. Rates are quite reasonable and range from $199/yr to $8000/yr depending on your requirements. More details on the pricing and what you get with each package is available here: https://acquia.com/product-matrix

There is also a free trial available at the same location that allows you to test out the Acquia Network fully for 30 days.