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Are you new to Drupal but experienced with making websites? Do want to learn how to create a website using Drupal? This two day course shows you how to use the most essential Drupal features which set it apart from other Content Management Systems. Read full article »

I really only want two things for my website: (1) I want the software that runs my website to be high-quality and (2) I want my website's content to be high-quality. It sounds easy and straight-forward but I assure you it isn't. Read full article »

We've been hard at work putting together web traffic reporting for all sites on Acquia Hosting, and it's now available in the Acquia Network subscription interface. These statistics provide a level of traffic detail across our hosting stack that is not available from other sources such as Google Analytics or log file analyzers like awstats, particularly, how many requests are being served from each layer of the Drupal and LAMP stack. We're also making available the fully expanded data behind these numbers as a CSV file download ready for import into your reporting tool of choice. Read full article »

About 20 months ago, at Acquia, we began working on a hosted offering for Apache Solr, an open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Exactly one year ago, we launched it commercially as Acquia Search. Time and the public reaction have proven that we made the right choice. Read full article »

We have marked the one year anniversary of the our hosted search service by rolling out a significant update with new features and some fixes. This was released Wednesday night (June 30). Read full article »

Cloud computing offers many advantages and challenges for hosting Drupal sites. Acquia Hosting is a highly available cloud-based hosting platform tuned for Drupal performance and scalability. Acquia Hosting built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), takes advantage of an industry leading cloud-computing platform to provide the highest levels of security, fault-tolerance and operational controls possible in the cloud. This Webinar, featuring Barry Jaspan, Senior Architect at Acquia and Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist Amazon Web Services, discusses how Amazon's Web Services can help Drupal site developers and managers solve common but vexing problems, including scaling. The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) components will be discussed in detail.

In addition we will discuss specific best practices for:

• Creating a high-performance, high-availability Drupal tuned hosting environment on AWS
• Load balancing: Elastic IP vs. Elastic Load Balancing
• Handling user-uploaded files with multiple web nodes
• Achieving true high-availability with multiple availability zones
• Choosing between Amazon Relational Database Service and building it yourself
• Configuring and managing your cloud servers

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SEO is a critical component of a succesful website.  It isn't a hack or a black art of the nefarious.  Instead, it's a vital business consideration. If your content is hard to find, no one is going to give it any notice.

When we started planning Drupal Gardens 18 months ago one of our goals was to help break down the barriers to creating stunning Drupal web sites. To that end we developed the Drupal Gardens' ThemeBuilder -- to allow people to point and click to create uniquely designed web sites, even if they don't know what CSS is or don't have the time to learn Drupal 7's powerful theme system.

There's a lot to say about the technical details of the Drupal Gardens themes.  But before I geek out I want to take a moment to discuss what the goals are that drive our themes' structures.

Well, Sprint 39 just finished up at Acquia Engineering and we've got a number of new exciting features and bug fixes releasing to Drupal Gardens in the next week.  One of these is Mollom - the best spam protection service on the internet - for all Drupal Gardens site owners.

Our CEO, Tom Erickson, announced right around the time of Drupalcon, that I was joining Acquia to fulfill a goal of ours - to provide Drupal education on a scalable, global basis.

We're very excited to announce an offering that we've been working on for some time now with our partners at Chapter Three and Carahsoft - Drupal Training in the Washington, DC area. With Drupal becoming a core platform for supporting President Obama's Open Government Directive and the demand on Drupal talent to support customer projects in the DC area, we feel that a "Drupal in a Day" class and "Drupal for Site Builders" class will be highly relevant.

Drupal in a Day $410 * gov't discount available book now
Date: Monday, June 28, 2010
Time: 9:00AM EDT - 4:00PM EDT
Location: MicroTek, 1101 Vermont Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20005

Drupal in a Day will be an overview of creating a Drupal site from start to finish. Participants will start with a blank website and, already having seen the final site, will start with adding and managing users, creating user profiles, adding custom content and managing that content (including turning on and off comments, or setting comments to read-only). Participants will then create custom content types and look at Views to display this content in various parts throughput the site including creating custom blocks and custom list pages such as a blogroll or last five images added or latest blog posts added to the site. (more info)

Drupal for Site Builders $820 * gov't discount available book now
Date: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 and Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Time: 9:00AM EDT - 4:00PM EDT
Location: MicroTek, 1101 Vermont Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20005

Drupal for Site Builders is a 2-day, in-depth extension to the first course. This course is designed both for users with no Drupal experience, and for those who are familiar with Drupal and want to expand their knowledge, digging deeper into their sites. The course provides in-depth discussions on Drupal’s installation process and managing users, comments, and content. Participants will also review Drupal's block system, and learn how to use taxonomy to categorize their content.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that traditional notions of “marketer” are long gone. Ten years ago you’d pretty much be able to categorize marketers into one or a few main buckets. We hung out at tradeshows, we had a handful of tools at our disposal to measure customer acquisition, engagement and ROI. For the most part we all worked in the same department- the marketing department. I was at Lotus at the time. It was a great little club and to all my fellow marketers who can actually remember what it was like back then, you know what I’m talking about.

I just found a cool service that identifies the hosting provider for any particular web site: www.WhoIsHostingThis.com. Although there are a few similar services out there, WhoIsHostingThis digs a little deeper to find the actual provider even if they're built on another cloud provider's infrastructure.

Check it out using some of the Acquia Hosted websites:
www.drupalgardens.com
www.nysenate.gov

Earlier this year, we launched Drupal Gardens in private beta here at Acquia. A couple of days ago, we hit the 10,000 site mark! I want to thank all the people that that continue to help test Drupal Gardens, and whom created 10,000 new Drupal Gardens sites in such a record time.

I recently did an interview about Acquia and Drupal with one of the leading IT magazines in Italy, Data Manager. The interview is running in the current print edition. Below you can find an English version of the interview.

The interview was arranged by one of Acquia's Italian partners, SinerVis, as part of a larger Drupal awareness campaign that culminated last week in the Do You Drupal? event that was held in Milan. Jam (Acquia's Senior Writer) and I attended and got to meet with colleagues from SinerVis as well as with members of "Associazione Drupal Italia", the non-profit that is promoting Drupal in Italy.

The take-away from the event was that Italy is seeing an explosion of interest in Drupal. Every company and service provider we talked to spoke of strong leads from many different industry segments, the need for training more drupalists, and an excitement for hosting more DrupalCamps (and possibly even a DrupalCon).

With such an acute need for training, it was good to learn that SinerVis, one of the leading companies for Drupal training in Italy, has as many as five Drupal courses each month with 10-12 people attending each one. They even teach a class on Drupal Gardens!

The demand for training was also mirrored in the response to the "Do You Drupal?" event. On the first day there was a room full of 50+ CIO/CTOs who listened to a range of presentations and discussions about Drupal and Acquia. Jam and I delivered a 2 hour (bilingual!) introduction to Acquia. The second part of the event, on the weekend, included training workshops for students and the general public. This drew over 200 people for two sessions. Jam ended up teaching for 5 hours, introducing Drupal, Acquia, and Drupal Gardens.

Although I was only in Milano for one day I did manage to enjoy some of the cultural delights. This is me sampling some gelato with graphic designers and account managers from SinerVis. The market for Drupal has rarely looked better.

Here's the interview that appeared in Datamanager.it:

Drupal is a modern web content management system that meets the needs of organizations who value speed and flexibility in developing their web presence. It has a vast worldwide community of passionate developers who have built a library of over 5,000 add-on modules in the last nine years. These let you add nearly any feature to a Drupal site that you can imagine. Drupal's core code is also modular, enabling developers to change and maintain the system cleanly. This has made it very popular with people who want highly customized web sites and specific functionality.

I pretty much spent my entire life in Antwerp -- 31 years to date. However, in just a few weeks, my family and I will be moving to Boston. Why?

Fusion is a powerful Drupal grid theme framework with point-and-click layouts & built in styles for Blocks, Views, and other modules. Learn how to unlock more of Drupal's potential with Fusion theming without needing to be a coder. Over 7000 sites today are using Fusion – join us and see why.

Key takeaways will include:

• A review of Fusion and Skinr key features
• How to build more flexible themes faster, without reinventing the wheel
• How to harness the power of Fusion to build themes faster and simplify future changes
• A tour of Drupal sites built using Fusion and Skinr

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Tom Chance wrote an interesting story on the gyrations involved in redesigning the City of London's web properties. Some real hiccups and large expenses prior to switching to Drupal, culminating in a happy ending with a great example of transparency and social engagement at the city government level.

When Google announced their new Font API and Font Directory, they gave the web publishing world a great new tool that is ready to add real business value right now. The directory is a bid to close the gap between the rich visual possibilities of print media and the typographically impoverished World Wide Web. In Google's words:

"The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page. The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers."