Fifth Annual Acquia Engage Awards: Honoring Open Source Contributions

This year, we have the pleasure of celebrating the best work of our customers and partners through the Acquia Engage Awards. At our first ever virtual Engage conference, we recognized the innovative brands that responded quickly to global events, crafted stellar digital experiences, and are leading the way in the digital world.

Last year, we introduced a new category to celebrate open source projects from organizations contributing to Drupal. The Open Source Giants category recognizes the strongest contributions to the Drupal ecosystem, whether that comes through GitHub, Drupal.org, code contributions, event sponsorship, community mentorship or technical excellence.  

Our Open Source Giants gave back to Drupal in tremendous ways through projects that covered everything from simplifying Drupal migrations to helping activate a quick response to the COVID-19 pandemic.   

We’re excited to commemorate our winners and finalists alongside Engage 2020.

Srijan (Winner) 

Srijan is an open source development and digital marketing agency that has specialized in Drupal development for more than 15 years. A global leader in open source technologies, Srijan works with organizations across many industries, including but not limited to media, travel, healthcare, telecom, retail, pharmaceutical, e-commerce and financial sector.

Srijan took home this year’s Open Source Giants Engage Award for the EzContent project, a Drupal installation profile that addresses common content management pain points and accelerates CMS implementations. EzContent includes critical capabilities for simplifying the layout and content creation process in Drupal including:

• A rich component library - Intuitive page builder that allows content editors to reuse components and quickly create pages without developer resources. 
• SEO-friendly content creation - Flexible fields, built-in meta tags, Schema.org usage for easy search engine optimization when creating content. 
• Decoupled support - All the power of a decoupled CMS with full access to the drag-and-drop features of Layout Builder on the front end.  
• AI-generated content - Smart content tagging driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. 

With their EzContent project, Srijan has made the following contributions:

• https://www.drupal.org/project/ezcontent
• https://www.drupal.org/project/ezcontent_api  
• https://www.drupal.org/project/fvm
• https://www.drupal.org/project/jsonapi_role_access
• https://www.drupal.org/project/ckeditor_layout_manager

Srijan has also contributed (and is currently maintaining) 120+ modules. Here's an illustrative list:

• https://www.drupal.org/project/disable_field
• https://www.drupal.org/project/username_check
• https://www.drupal.org/project/parallax
• https://www.drupal.org/project/animate_any
• https://www.drupal.org/project/boost_cache_cleaner
• https://www.drupal.org/project/extra_image_field_classes
• https://www.drupal.org/project/himalaya
• https://www.drupal.org/project/dlike
• https://www.drupal.org/project/user_created_by
• https://www.drupal.org/project/theme_color_meta_tag
• https://www.drupal.org/project/restrict_abusive_words
• https://www.drupal.org/project/smartmenus
• https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_bulk_clone
• https://www.drupal.org/project/watchdog_prune
• https://www.drupal.org/project/content_tab
• https://www.drupal.org/project/menu_link_clone
• https://www.drupal.org/project/rewrite_field
• https://www.drupal.org/project/facebook_rules
• https://www.drupal.org/project/insha

Palantir.net (Finalist)

 Palantir.net focuses on creating solutions with a positive impact. In 2020, they focused on creating Drupal Rector, a tool to accelerate the adoption of Drupal.

In less than four months, Rector rules had been created for the top 50 Drupal core deprecations, covering over 72% of core deprecations that are used by contrib modules. Just over one month before the release of Drupal 9, 43% of all remaining issues within contributed modules could be fixed automatically with Drupal Rector. 

Drupal Association CTO Tim Lehnen noted, “This is an incredible milestone! Imagine how much labor from our open source contributors we can save. Many thanks to Palantir for working on the Drupal Rector project.” 

By Drupal 9’s release on June 3, 95% of the top 100 contributed projects were Drupal 9 ready, while 83% of the top 200 were. Gábor Hojsty noted, “This is unprecedented in Drupal's recent history.” After the Drupal 9 launch, work on Drupal Rector is continuing, both to support companies and organizations looking to upgrade their sites from D8 to D9 and also to support future upgrades to Drupal 10.

Mediacurrent (Finalist)

Mediacurrent holds strategic and innovative solutions at the center of their model. Turning those tenets towards the global pandemic this year, they created Area Alert, which supports organizations that need to build large-scale and easy-to-update emergency websites quickly.

Working through different user scenarios, the Mediacurrent team built emergency sites that would be both easy to build and easy to navigate for people dealing with crisis. Key highlights from this project include: 

Speedy time to launch - Area Alert expedites emergency website creation, configuration and deployment. Organizations can now rapidly develop and deploy emergency websites in a matter of hours or days, not weeks or months. 

Calm in the chaos - The overall design approach takes the panicked user into consideration. Mediacurrent strove to maximize findability by employing high color contrast, clear type hierarchy, plain language and classic interface colors (such as blue for links, red for alerts, yellow for warnings, etc.). Large, clear pointer/touch targets welcome shaking fingers. 

Support for first responders - Area Alert reduces calls to emergency services by providing reusable information centrally to communities in need. The flexible system accommodates not only a wide range of emergency scenarios but the many potential competencies and quantities of personnel that are required to make vital information available to the public.

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Thank you to all of our Open Source Giants for setting a powerful example for what it means to give back and make an impact. To hear more of the inspiring stories from this year’s Engage Awards, check out our gallery of winners and finalists.