A number of concerns have been voiced from the community about the substantial growth Acquia has achieved since its inception, the number of key contributors who are now employed by Acquia, and the subsequent influence that this allows Acquia to have on the project.
acquia
New Drupal Cloud Apps Announced at London Drupalcon
At the London Drupalcon 2011, Acquia announced a new set of components for its web services, which are applications, support and tools to help all Drupal developers, from novice to expert skill levels.
Acquia was founded in 2007 by Dries Buytaert and Jay Batson, and offers products and support for Drupal. It offers its network, hosting, Drupal Gardens, software, and training services.
These new tools are Insight, SEO Grader, Blitz and Drupalize.me.
More than an Introduction to Accrisoft
Accrisoft. A few months ago, I knew little about Accrisoft or their flagship product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS. In early May, CMS Report met with the company for the first time and it was a great opportunity for me to get to know them better. Accrisoft is a company that anybody who is somebody in the content management business definitely needs to get to know better.
It's not that often I become quickly enthralled with a company and their products. Yet, for the past couple months I can't help but think of the first demo I saw of Accrisoft's CMS. It wasn't just the genius simplicity of their blue/green user interface for users and developers that I'm obsessing about either. It is the fact that Accrisoft convinced me it's not only users that need to rethink how websites are managed, but also the many site owners and developers that incorrectly think they don't need a company like Accrisoft.
Accrisoft is a provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) Web applications and they definitely made a big splash at last Spring's 2011 CMS Expo. During the expo, I was able to meet up with Accrisoft's CEO, Jeff Kline, as well as their chief technology officer, Mark Zeitler. It wasn't just their product, Accrisoft Freedom CMS, that won me over that day but also their enthusiasm and technical vision of what the future holds for web content management.
If Accrisoft isn't on your radar it is time to put it there. For the last five years I've focused most of my attention on CMSs that individuals and organizations are more likely to manage and host themselves. Quite frankly, a portion of my DNA is old-school IT and I've stubbornly been unyielding to any notion of running a content management system in the cloud. I've always wanted to maintain as much control as I could on the servers that host my CMS. Control of your IT assets is a good thing, isn't it? The talk of the cloud is just slick marketing talk, isn't it? Accrisoft, as well as Acquia, have persuaded me to believe that it makes perfect business and technical sense to utlize SaaS CMS.
Acquia Search now does more
Some of the most enjoyable Drupal moments for me was the time I spent in 2009 testing Acquia's Search for Drupal. Acquia Search is a plug-and-play service within the Acquia Network, built on Apache Solr and available for any Drupal 6 site.
I think Acquia Search is probably one of the most significant services provided on the Acquia Network and the feature that will continue to attract businesses to not only Acquia but also Drupal.
So although I'm no longer on the Acquia network, I'm pleased to hear that new features have been added to this Apache Solr implementation.
Some of the more significant features being added to Acquia Search include:
- Attachment Indexing - Utilizing the Apache Solr Attachment module you can now search the text in document files such as PDF and Word documents. This is big! Even cooler, those documents can searched locally or remotely.
- Multi-site Searches - Search multiple Drupal sites at once.
- Update to Solr 1.4.1 which fixes a number of bugs.
- Wildcard Searches
So How Much Did Drupalcon San Francisco Rock? A LOT!
Joe Bachana of DPCI gives his take on what made Drupalcon SF 2010 such a success.
Wake-Up call for media marketers
Acquia: "What do media companies really need to take their websites to the next level? With social media came an influx of blogs, wikis, and forums in the media market - but many lacked real strategy or commitment to the success of the cause. Marketers certainly "get" the value of community, but in looking across so many sites in the industry, media brands could be doing so much more to strengthen their brand equity through their sites."
CMS Report's Ten Additional Stories for 2009
A couple days ago, I posted CMS Report's Top Ten Stories of 2009. The articles listed were ranked by popularity based by how many times viewed and the rate that they were viewed through the year. Popular stories do not always signify well written articles or are always an indication of personal favorites. Each year, I write a number of content management or IT related articles that I love but for various reasons you the people didn't have interest in reading and sharing.
Below are some of my favorite articles written in 2009 that were not a part of the previously posted Top Ten list. If I had a Top 20 Stories list the articles in both of these listings would be included.
- Looking forward to Microsoft's Windows 7
- Reviewing Barrie North's Joomla! 1.5 book and video
- The problem is bigger than SharePoint
- Testing the water with Acquia Search for Drupal
- Shortcomings of Enterprise Wiki Deployments
- Two CMS Worlds on Twitter
- Charging for online news doomed to fail
- Theme development and the GPL
- Judging Five Overall Best Content Management Systems
- Quoting IT: Addison Berry
CMS Report's Top Ten Stories of 2009
The level of interest in content management systems astounds me. Each year, I continue to see at CMS Report an increase of visitors looking for information on content management. Our stories tend to focus on open source CMS more than proprietary applications and evidently that's the subject matter that our readers want to read.
Below are the top ten stories of 2009 that were posted here at CMSReport.com. As you can see, stories involving Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Alfresco, and Nuxeo took center stage. These stories might not have been the ten I would have personally picked for this list, but I'll respect the numbers behind their ranking.
- Mollom: A solution for comment spam
- 2009 Best Open Source PHP CMS: Drupal wins, Wordpress and Joomla! not far behind
- Serving a home for my Drupal site
- WordPress leads the Packt as 2009 Overall Best Open Source CMS
- Allen Ellis: Why the Packt CMS Competition is Broken, and How to Fix It
- Google PageRank
- Alfresco Module Obtains U.S. DoD 5015.02 Records Management Certification
- Using Wordpress city saves $19,000
- Cheryl McKinnon, Nuxeo, and Open Source
- Drupal Gardens preview video by Acquia
The interest in Nuxeo took me by surprise and I'll be adding the CMS to my top 30 CMS Focus page as time allows. As always, our thanks to all those who continue to return to this site to read the stories, join in on the conversation, and even submit articles. As I've said before, I'm not sure we would be doing this if it wasn't for the interest shown by others visiting the site.
CMS Report's September Sponsors
Our sponsors are simply an amazing group of companies. Without their financial support the ability and incentive for hosting this site would be much less. If you like what you see at CMSReport.com, we encourage you to also pay a visit to our sponsors' websites. CMS Report is selective on who we allow to sponsor us and we've actually denied some very lucrative offers because we felt their products just weren't for our visitors. The banner ads you see from our sponsors represent products we could see ourselves utilizing.
If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, you can purchase banner space at this site either through Google's ad services or through BuySellAds. Sponsorship helps us pay for the bills of our host provider, internet service provider, and any software or hardware needed to support CMSReport.com.
CMS Report wants to thank our current sponsors for their support.
Acquia - Acquia is a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system. With over two million downloads since inception, Drupal is used by web developers worldwide to build sophisticated community websites.
JoomlaShack - JoomlaShack offers Joomla! templates and custom services. If you are looking for a reliable quality template at an affordable price, JoomlaShack is the right place to visit.
CMS themer - CMS themer is a professional theming service catered to designers, developers and web companies who do not have the time or expertise to theme a CMS based on an existing website or design.
etonDigital - etonDigital crafts custom social networks for Business and Alumni Communities, Members, Friends, Associations or any other social/professional networking group.
CMS Report also wants to thank these enthusiastic Google Adsense advertisers.
Adobe - Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information.
Ektron - Ektron provides a complete platform with all of the functionality necessary to create, deploy, and manage your Web site.
pTools - pTools Enterprise Web Content Management Software delivers powerful intranet, extranet and Internet solutions for critical business initiatives.
Sitecore - The Sitecore CMS allows you to create rich interactive websites, easily. It scales to meet virtually any need.
Drupal Gardens preview video by Acquia
Not long ago, Acquia announced a new product/service called Drupal Gardens. In the announcement, Dries Buytaert gave his description of Drupal Gardens.
For those who have not heard about Acquia Gardens, this product will provide an easy on-ramp for people to experience the awesome power of Drupal without having to worry about installation, hosting and upgrading. Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning for Drupal. Think of it as 'Drupal as a service'.
Acquia continues to slowly give additional information on what can be expect from Drupal Gardens. The latest post on the company's website includes a preview screencast of Acquia's new service.
Support the sponsors that support CMS Report
Our sponsors are simply an amazing group. Without their financial support the ability and incentive for hosting this site would be much less. If you like what you read at CMSReport.com, we encourage you to also pay a visit to the websites of our sponsors. We are actually a little bit choosy on the sponsors we allow on this site by making sure they provide content management related services and products that we ourselves would be interested in too.
If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, you can purchase banner space at this site either through Google's ad services or through BuySellAds. Sponsorship helps us pay for the bills from our host provider, internet service provider, and any software or hardware needed to support CMSReport.com.
CMS Report wants to thank our current sponsors for their support.
Acquia - Acquia is a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system. With over two million downloads since inception, Drupal is used by web developers worldwide to build sophisticated community websites.
JoomlaShack - JoomlaShack offers Joomla! templates and custom services. If you are looking for a reliable quality template at an affordable price, JoomlaShack is the right place to visit.
Interspire - Interspire Website Publisher is a content management system which makes it easy for non-technical users to create and maintain fully functional websites. Over 5,000 customers are using our software to power their websites and applications.
CMS themer - CMS themer is a professional theming service catered to designers, developers and web companies who do not have the time or expertise to theme a CMS based on an existing website or design.
CMS Report also wants to thank these enthusiastic Google Adsense advertisers.
Adobe - Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information.
Ektron - Ektron provides a complete platform with all of the functionality necessary to create, deploy, and manage your Web site.
Microsoft - Microsoft has been advertising their enterprise search capabilities as well as their new version of Internet Explorer, IE8.
pTools - pTools Enterprise Web Content Management Software delivers powerful intranet, extranet and Internet solutions for critical business initiatives.
CMS Report thanks our July Sponsors
The month of July brought a big change to how we do sponsorship here at CMSReport.com. We removed the text link advertisements due to some of our sponsors using the service more for search engine optimization than true advertisement of their products. The goal for making this change is to pull in higher quality sponsors here at CMSReport.com. We think we can achieve this goal by only allowing advertisement via quality ad services such as Google's ad services and BuySellAds.
CMS Report took a financial hit because of this change, but with your help we'll recover. If you or your company produces a CMS or social media related product, please consider helping us out via the purchase of ad space. Sponsorship helps us pay the bills from our host provider, internet service provider, and any software or hardware needed to support CMSReport.com.
CMS Report wants to thank our current sponsors for their support.
Acquia - Acquia is a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system. With over two million downloads since inception, Drupal is used by web developers worldwide to build sophisticated community websites.
Interspire - Interspire Website Publisher is a content management system which makes it easy for non-technical users to create and maintain fully functional websites. Over 5,000 customers are using our software to power their websites and applications.
CMS themer - CMS themer is a professional theming service catered to designers, developers and web companies who do not have the time or expertise to theme a CMS based on an existing website or design.
CMS Report also wants to thank these enthusiastic Google Adsense advertisers.
Artisteer - Artisteer provides Web design automation product that instantly creates fantastic looking, unique website templates and blog themes. Design WordPress Blogs, professional Joomla! and Drupal templates, and cool Website designs in minutes
Ektron - Ektron provides a complete platform with all of the functionality necessary to create, deploy, and manage your Web site.
Kentico - Kentico CMS for ASP.NET - flexible, all-in-one solution for web developers.
Microsoft - Microsoft has been advertising their enterprise search capabilities as well as their new version of Internet Explorer, IE8.
pTools - pTools Enterprise Web Content Management Software delivers powerful intranet, extranet and Internet solutions for critical business initiatives
Acquia Search becomes publicly available
A couple days ago, Acquia moved Acquia Search out of beta and made it available commercially available through their Acquia Network service. Acquia Search is a hosted search service based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The technology supporting Acquia Search is based on the the Open Source Lucene and Solr distributions from the Apache project. While a free search module is already available in Drupal, as well as Acquia Drupal, Acquia Search is significantly different and geared toward the enterprise. Smaller but high traffic websites would also benefit from Acquia Search.
CMS Report has been beta testing Acquia Search for the past four months and we've had nothing but a positive experience with the service. In fact I feel as a beta tester I somehow didn't do my job since I didn't have any issues to report to Acquia. However, Acquia did acquire various usage statistics, email exchanges, and surveys from us that they still benefited from CMSReport.com's participation in the beta program. Since I know only enough about Drupal to be dangerous, if I can't break it then Acquia must be on the right track with this product.
Thank you to CMS Report's June Sponsors
Sponsorship is a big thing here at CMS Report. Sponsorship helps pay the bills to the host provider, internet service provider, and any software or hardware needed to support CMSReport.com. Sponsorship also does one more important thing. Without sponsorship providing a little extra money in Bryan's pockets, he would have a hard time justifying the amount of time he spends away from his wife and son to support this blog. So if you become a sponsor at CMS Report, you're not only helping to fund a website, you may also be saving a marriage.
CMS Report uses BuySellAds.com to sell banner space to our sponsors. Currently, we're running a summer special with the price of our 300x250 banner space at only $70 per month. This price reflects 30% off our normal asking price.
CMS Report wants to thank our current sponsors for their support.
Acquia - Acquia is a commercial open source software company providing products, services, and technical support for the open source Drupal social publishing system. With over two million downloads since inception, Drupal is used by web developers worldwide to build sophisticated community websites.
Interspire - Interspire Website Publisher is a content management system which makes it easy for non-technical users to create and maintain fully functional websites. Over 5,000 customers are using our software to power their websites and applications.
CMS themer - CMS themer is a professional theming service catered to designers, developers and web companies who do not have the time or expertise to theme a CMS based on an existing website or design.
HostDone - HostDone Inc. offers affordable hosting without loosing the quality of web hosting service and performance.
Wild Apricot - Wild Apricot has been specifically built to store member records and contact lists and link them to your Website and other software tools to automate and streamline administrative tasks for clubs, associations and communities.
Netidnow - NetIDNow provides all the tools you need to make your own website or an ecommerce store quickly and inexpensively.
CMS Report also wants to thank these enthusiastic Google Adsense advertisers.
Adobe - Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information.
Artisteer - Artisteer provides Web design automation product that instantly creates fantastic looking, unique website templates and blog themes. Design WordPress Blogs, professional Joomla! and Drupal templates, and cool Website designs in minutes
Ektron - Ektron provides a complete platform with all of the functionality necessary to create, deploy, and manage your Web site.
Microsoft - Microsoft has been advertising their enterprise search capabilities as well as their new version of Internet Explorer, IE8.
Start-up built on free software
The Boston Globe: "The software was free.
"Free is very disruptive," Batson said. "In a fragmented market, 'free' commands a lot of attention."
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