Acquia News & Articles

Welcome to the February installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Red Hat (news, site), one of the poster children of the Linux and open source communities, has launched a new online community to promote open source across various industries.

The New York State Senate was in the hands of the same political party for 44 years. In 2009 that finally changed. With the new administration came new ways, including hiring the state senate's first CIO, Andrew Hoppin. Within months, their web presence would completely change.
 

With all of the chatter about Drupal 7, it would have been easy to miss one or two Drupal-related announcements last April. One of those announcements dealt with Buzzr (news, site), a Lullabot (news, site)-spawned startup focused on bringing hosted Drupal solutions to the masses.

Aside from a small announcement last August, the folks at Buzzr have been pretty quiet, so we thought we'd check in.

It's not easy being popular. You live under the specter of something new breathing down your neck, waiting to take your spot in the limelight. Yes, we know all about it.

But seriously, in the content management world uncool means stale, broken, or worse, irrelevant. Fortunately for Drupal (news, site), the much discussed version 7 release is looking strong. It'll keep its cool we reckon and in the process it's shaping up to further enter the mainstream. Here are the key changes to note.

Acquia (news, site) has given us a sneak peek at Drupal Gardens, and a new remote administration service for our Drupal (news, sites) websites. But that isn't all. They have also announced that their new hosting service, called Acquia Hosting, is now officially available.

Enterprise users of the Drupal (news, site) web content management system can now let someone else deal with their administration problems with the introduction of remote administration services by Acquia (news, site).

Just think about it -- if you sign up to this service you can have someone else deal with core security updates, module security updates or user roles modifications amongst a whole list of other things -- and for many the remoter the better when it comes to these problems.

Installing and setting up a CMS might not be the most complex thing you'll ever do, but it's enough to cost many non-technical users a few chunks of hair. At DrupalCon Paris, Acquia (news, site) announced a new service that helps people create, configure, and launch a Drupal 7 site with relative ease.

Drupal Gardens, originally labeled Acquia Gardens, has been one of the hot issues at this year's European DrupalCon in Paris. Gardens is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of the highly popular Drupal web content management system.

We sat down with Tom Erickson, Acquia's CEO, to discuss the Gardens project, the Drupal Theme Builder, Drupal 7 and Acquia's pathways to profitability. Here's what we learned.

Dries Buytaert is somewhat of a CMS superhero. Between founding the mega popular open source platform Drupal, co-founding the commercialized Drupal cure-all Acquia, and probably saving babies from burning buildings, Buytaert also found the time to launch a spam-killing service called Mollom.

Recently the service got some attention from a company called Zion Security. After tinkering in Mollom’s open API, Zion announced a Microsoft IIS module utilizing the spam killer. The release has opportunity for other CMS and web application platforms written all over it.

Oh Drupal (news, site), you open source hottie, you. You've managed the content of many, kicked out release after release, even inspired projects like Acquia and Open Atrium. Now, as you gear up to dazzle your fans with the Drupal 7 Code Freeze, potential new Drupal followers are beginning to peek their heads out from behind their present content management systems.

Readers, if you fall into this category, don't worry, we won't tell. But you should know that learning this fully loaded CMS is no easy task, so here are some recommended starting points:

Show Acquia (news, site) the money, and it'll be nothin' new. The commercialized cure-all for the Drupal publishing system has raised a whopping US$ 8million in their second round of venture capital funding, according to a recent SEC filing.

The sizable chunk of moolah is just an addition to their nest egg, as the company scored US$ 7million back in December, during round one. First time around funders included North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Said Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal and co-founder of Acquia, "The funding allows us to quickly bring together a world-class team, rent office space, buy equipment, etc. Starting a great company is not cheap, especially if you have big dreams and plans."

The million dollar improvement certainly reflects well of the company, and we presume new CEO Tom Erickson (the "world domination" guy) is especially pleased. Before replacing Acquia co-founder Jay Batson in March of this year, Erickson was an active participant as a member of the Advisory Board.

Another increase in numbers includes the amount of funders. While Acquia saw three generous hands last December, a reported total of four reached out in March. The money is said to be for working capital.

Will Acquia divide and conquer? If things keep going the way they are, then we think some serious domination is definitely within reach.

Development Seed, a communication shop dedicated to creating handy Drupal-based solutions, today announced the availability of a whole kit and caboodle of open source intranet wonder.

Open Atrium, now officially in its public Beta phase, is an open source starter intranet package that includes popular tools like blogs, wikis, a calendar, to-do lists, a ticketing system and microblogging.

After allowing Acquia Search to simmer in over two hundred and fifty beta tester kitchens for a few months, Acquia (news, site) has taken the product and added it to its selection of hosted Acquia Network services.

What ho! Is that a new version of WordPress (news, site)  we spy?

The answer is yes. But of course, you probably knew already; WordPress 2.8 was released for immediate download toward the end of last week. Just like most seasoned blogging platform fans, we’ve come to expect big things from the system. This time, the newest version not only fits the usual bill, it also presents some pretty stiff competition for other platforms like Drupal.