acquia drupal planet

Yesterday we completed our pre-DrupalCon sprint and are excited to introduce several great new features, with a special focus on designers and site creators who need an awesome looking site. Specifically in this release we have added great support for professional fonts. As designers know, font selection is one key area where average web sites are separated from remarkable sites. In the past, font options for web sites were limited or complex to implement: you could create your own images with embedded expensive licensed fonts, or you could purchase, install and embed fonts yourself.

In Drupal Gardens 2 month update Chris wrote about a number of the improvements to Drupal Gardens in our last sprint. I want to focus on our solution for a system that now lets us perform Gardens site upgrades with only a couple minutes of maintenance (site offline) time per site when running database updates. The problem was made a little more difficult by the custom domain feature that was also going live, so each Drupal site (database) might be referenced by multiple sites directories. I describe here the solution we worked out, which involves using Drush, the (internal) Acquia Hosting APIs, and communication with the http://www.drupalgardens.com/ site so that each site in our multi-site installs could be seamlessly moved between two different versions of Drupal 7.

With the second alpha release of Drupal 7 just out the door, a lot of effort has recently gone into making it possible to upgrade sites from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 (which is obviously a requirement for Drupal 7 to be released).

What's in store? Some new features for module developers, as well as an easier time for site administrators. Here's a quick rundown:

Drupal's file handling capabilities keep getting better. Beyond the core upload module, the filefield module for CCK has enabled us to build sites with all sorts of files; documents, images, music, videos, and so forth. Searching within these docuements, however, has never been a common feature on Drupal sites. Some solutions have existed, particularly for extracting texts from PDFs and common wordprocessing documents. With Apache Solr, the attachments module, and an extension library called Tika, things can be much better. With Tika you can extract texts not only from Microsoft Office, Open Office, and PDF documents, you can also get text and metadata from images, songs, Flash movies and zipped archives. Searching for these texts is done as part of the normal Apache Solr driven site search.