Industry News
Acquia Unveils Roadmap to Commercially Supported Drupal
Open Source Social Publishing System Gears Up for Enterprise Use
Mar. 3, 2008 01:15 PM
Acquia provided new details on plans to deliver a commercially supported
distribution and value-added network services based on the popular Drupal open
source social publishing system. The company also threw open the doors on
Acquia Projects, a collaborative environment for Drupal community members to
participate in the direction of forthcoming Acquia products and services.
Acquia plans to ship a commercially supported distribution of Drupal,
code-named “Carbon.” The Carbon distribution will include the Drupal 6 core
release and essential extension modules for assembling social publishing sites
and applications. With Carbon in hand, web developers will have fully
integrated and tested building blocks for user management, web content
management, single or multi-user blogs, wiki collaboration, discussion forums,
user-generated content, social networking and more. In keeping with the spirit
of the open source development model, all Acquia-developed Drupal code will be
freely licensed under the GPL v2 license and the company will work continuously
to merge new features and patches into the main line Drupal project through the
established community process.
“Having a commercially supported distribution like Carbon is an essential step
in the maturation of the Drupal project,” said Dries Buytaert, Acquia
co-founder and Drupal creator and project lead. “I am personally committed to
ensuring that this distribution works to the benefit of the entire Drupal
community.”
Acquia plans to provide a range of maintenance and support subscriptions
designed to meet the requirements of both individual developers and
organizations utilizing the Carbon distribution. Acquia subscriptions will
enable customers to harness the full open source power of Drupal without
sacrificing the accountability and support of commercial software.
Finally, as part of the initial Acquia subscription offerings, the company
plans to introduce an enhanced electronic update notification service,
code-named “Spokes,” that will automatically provide users of the Acquia
distribution with specific and actionable information to maintain system
performance, security, and stability. While the current Drupal update module
provides unfiltered notifications for all Drupal updates, the Spokes update
notification service will provide notifications for updates that have been
reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia.
“We are on a mission to make Drupal the industry standard open source social
publishing system,” said Jay Batson, Acquia co-founder. “For that to happen, we
must offer the accountability and support businesses have come to expect, and
Carbon and Spokes are just the first step in meeting this demand.”
“We’re seeing a clear convergence of content management, social media, and web
frameworks in the marketplace,” said Geoffrey Bock, Lead Analyst at Gilbane.
“Drupal is at the center of this trend, and backing from Acquia will solidify
that position.”
The Acquia subscription offerings, Carbon distribution, and the Spokes update
notification service are expected for public release in the second half of
2008. To learn more, and to participate in the direction of these and
forthcoming Acquia development projects, visit http://acquia.com/projects.
For more information
on Acquia please contact Jena Murphy JMurphy@citigatecunningham.com
at Citigate Cunningham.