Acquia, a provider of commercial solutions for Drupal, announced today that Twitter selected a Drupal-based community solution for its new Twitter developer website at dev.twitter.com. The site, which was developed with support and guidance from Acquia, launched July 11, 2011.
Despite Twitter buying up the most popular third-party apps, there is still a booming market for new tools to help manage the sprawling Twitterverse, and guess who is helping Twitter support that market? Acquia & Drupal.
Today's web applications face very real challenges to deployment. Websites are incredibly content rich, highly dynamic, and subject to massive swings in load because of anything from content gone viral to the death of a celebrity.
Putting a CMS in the cloud addresses the scalability issue--at least, in theory. The cloud must be optimized for the application to get its full benefit. It doesn't matter that three servers are ready to catch extra traffic if they're not configured to do so. Further, a cloud platform that's not configured to match the CMS's particular needs will have to work much harder than it needs to, resulting in higher loads than is really needed to serve the traffic. For example, it makes sense to cache static content: But will the cloud be able to tell the difference between a user who's signed into the application (and therefore receives dynamic content) and one who isn't?
I’ve only been with Acquia for three weeks as a intern and I have to say I love every moment of it. I work on the Operations and Hosting Engineering team and last week, my second week, I was placed on a on-call rotation for Operations. A on-call rotation is like being an E.R. Doctor though my patients were servers. You have to set up your phone and laptop to receive ‘critical’ notifications from our internal monitoring and notification system as well as be prepared with all the tools you could possibly need to handle any situation.
Acquia’s social business software distribution, Drupal Commons has allowed many developers to build community sites easily with Drupal. This has always been one of the major goals of Drupal Commons – to help Drupal adoption by making it easy for people to create great community sites quickly without having to build from scratch.
I posted a news blog earlier this month concerning some high profile adoption of the Drupal open source Content Management System (CMS) -- or to use Drupal's preferred description, "The free and open source software package for publishing, managing and organising a variety of content on a website."
With Drupalcon London coming up this August and with the interest that story received I feel it is justified if we revisit the topic with some comment from the commercially-backed spiral arm of the Drupal galaxy.
... and the name you are looking for here is Acquia.
Social business is no longer a nice to have, but is now a business imperative to improve customer communication and engagement, build loyal partner networks and improve internal collaboration.
We have been blogging, tweeting, connecting and collaborating online for years, but now it’s not just for personal use. The growth in social business can be measured by the amount being spent on software solutions purchased to help enterprises meet their social business strategies. According to Gartner, spending on social software to support sales, marketing, product development and customer service will exceed $1 billion worldwide in 2013.
