Acquia's Carbon Renamed to Confuse Drupal Community?

By James Mowery Sep 30, 2008

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After much waiting and anticipation from the open source content management world, Acquia has officially released Acquia Drupal, a free and commercially supported distribution of the Drupal Web CMS platform that marks the company's first major move since its inception.

Unfortunately, in the process, Acquia might end up confusing the new and existing Drupalers more than intended. The Drupal community might consider this as a negative move — as Acquia, a commercial entity, has associated itself with Drupal, an open source project, a fair bit too much.

CMSWire talked with Bryan House, Acquia's product marketing director, to get more insight into this release.

With growth to 27 full-time employees and contractors, Acquia has quickly become an important part of the Drupal community for reasons that many people still don't understand. At first, feelings were mixed on how Acquia's beta release of Carbon would affect the Drupal project and community, but things have been relatively quiet since then. But now, Acquia has completed its first major project that is expected to be beneficial to anyone and everyone involved with Drupal and Acquia.

Bryan House pointed out how these are truly exciting times for the Drupal community and for Acquia. “We are completing the Drupal experience,” House said.

To understand the meaning of that statement, one must understand the differences and similarities between Drupal and Acquia Drupal. But that is the root of the problem.

The Differences Between Drupal and Acquia Drupal

Users of Drupal will be quite familiar with Acquia Drupal; with a few exceptions in mind, it practically is Drupal. Now, that in itself is challenging to explain to someone new to Drupal and/or Acquia, and this is why Acquia's naming decision was questionable. There is practically no distinction now.

There are differences, but we must make it clear that this is Acquia Drupal and not Drupal.

A Better Beginning

The first big difference with Acquia Drupal is the inclusion of additional community modules that extend the CMS's out-of-the-box capabilities. Building a blog or a wiki can now be accomplished faster than ever before. House told CMSWire that the company had initially considered around 20 - 30 modules to include into Acquia Drupal, and they all represent some of the best that the Drupal community has to offer.

The reasoning behind the inclusion of more modules is to allow a site developer to have a better starting point from which to build a site — no more hunting around for the basic modules to get things like custom content types created. Truth be told, there are quite a few modules that many experienced Drupal users typically install by default (e.g. CCK), and this change simply adds those frequently used modules.

In addition, Acquia also licensed a few fresh themes to be available to users from the get-go.

Now, all that is great, but let's get to the real reason why someone would be interested in Acquia Drupal.

Commercial Support with the Acquia Network

The quintessential difference between Drupal and Acquia Drupal is the Acquia Network. Its purpose is to help users and organizations in situations where support is required. Acquia would tell us that it is a significant part of “completing the Drupal experience.”

The Acquia Network is the culmination of community support, ticket-based support, email and telephone support, up-time monitoring, spam blocking and documentation all packaged into one tightly knit interface that allows users to stay on top of their Acquia Drupal sites. However, it doesn't end there.

The Acquia Network also acts as an “operations portal” that allows users to manage Acquia Drupal sites and connect with support. Think of it as the cPanel of Acquia Drupal site management and support. It is a way to get a glimpse of a user's Acquia Drupal sites.