Stacking up Drupal

Why the Acquia Drupal Stack is now the Drupal development stack of choice. Drupal On-ramp - Personal experiences at Drupal events in recent months and reports from friends and colleagues indicate that the Acquia Drupal Stack Installer is really changing the installation experience for new users. This incredibly fast, painless on-ramp experience - it lets you get right into "Drupalling" without fighting with ports, permissions, or database connections - is winning over new users at Drupal Camps around the world. Jaws have been dropping and eyes lighting up when users see that all you need to do to install a complete, local Apache, MySQL, PHP stack and set up a Drupal site on top of it, is enter username, password and a couple other details and click "go." The fact that it now only takes a few clicks and a couple of minutes to set up is a real game changer. The Acquia Drupal Stack Installer has a lot more going for it, too ... Multisite for site developers - Creating a second (and third and fourth) site to run in the Acquia Drupal stack is even quicker and easier, since it takes advantage of Drupal's built-in multisite capabilities. This makes it a terrific tool for site developers, too. You can create (and destroy again) as many fresh sites as you need within seconds - test features and functionality, try different options and modules, throw it all out again and start new. Even for those of us who are very practiced at this, this still helps save you time and (mental) energy for what is important. Introducing codebase import - Now there's more! This wonderful helper in the battle to win more Drupal users and fantastic site-development tool is now also a powerful tool for Drupal-code-development, too. Alongside site creation - adding new sites that run on the installed Acquia Drupal codebase - the latest version of the Acquia Drupal Stack will import and run any Drupal 5, 6 or 7 codebase! You can import existing sites with their databases for local testing, upgrade staging and development. You can also import raw Drupal 6- or 7-based codebases - downloaded from drupal.org, patched or customized - into the Acquia Drupal stack for testing and development purposes: patch testing, core development, and so on. Technology - On a technical level, the DAMP (Drupal + AMP) stack, as it is affectionately known, is a complete, stand-alone installation that will run on a great number of Windows systems and Intel Macs running OS 10.5. You can change or remove the DAMP stack and its components easily any time without worrying about messing up anything else you are running (and vice versa). The DAMP stack will not come into conflict with other AMP stacks (running Drupal or anything else) or development tools you have installed as long as you configure them to address different Apache and MySQL ports. In Summary, the Acquia Drupal Stack gives users and developers:

• quick and easy Drupal on-ramp experience
• instant multisite creation and deletion for site developers
• codebase import (existing sites and raw Drupal 6 & 7 codebases) for website and Drupal core developers
• Stand-alone AMP stack that won't conflict with other tools or the OS

We think this all adds up to make the Acquia Drupal Stack Installer an essential tool in any Drupal toolbox. PS - Look for a Linux version coming soon to an Ubuntu package manager near you ...