Dries Buytaert: All about Acquia Video
Dries Buytaert: All about Acquia Video Transcript
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>>Drupal is an open source content management system which is particularly strong in the sort of the social positioning area -- everything with community interaction. I started to work on Drupal as a student when I was studying at the University of Antwerp and I was living in a student dorm. We needed a message board and I wanted to explore new technologies like PHP and MySQL as well as other web stuff and I did that for awhile and then I graduated to move out of the student dorm so I decided to move the message boards to the internet and at a certain point it got many, much feedback from people that came to the website and I decided to release the software behind the website as open source. This was in 2001, early 2001 when I released the software behind the website as Drupal 1.0. Eventually more and more people came to the project and started to use it for their sites and I started to help writing code and slowly but certainly the community was building around Drupal. We also had a couple of important tipping points along the way. In 2004 Howard Dean, presidential candidate in the United States, used Drupal as one of the tools to campaign and to raise money, which definitely gave us some credibility. We also started organizing Drupal conferences. So if you look at the history of Drupal, it's sort of this chain of interesting tipping points. You know the Drupal project, itself, is really great and is many strong things going for it like it's a very modular architecture, it has a thriving development community and all of these things. I think what Acquia will do is it will provide additional value that the Drupal community cannot provide as an open source community, specifically, it will do a couple of things. First we will work on a Drupal distribution which means we'll take Drupal core and combine it with a number of modules, package it up, do Q and A testing on it, make sure it's easy to install for people, for example, by providing one-click installers that come with a fact sheet, MySQL and the other pieces in the stack. So that's one thing we'll do and we'll make that available as open source. The second thing we'll do is what we call the Acquia Network which is a subscription-based service that you can subscribe to and if you are already a customer it can go to the website, the Acquia Network website to get access to a number of electronically delivered services such as, for example, an update notification service to Core, or the Heartbeat Service to see if your site is still up and running, or as a protection service to help block comment spam. We have a long list of services that we want to implement over time and add to the Acquia Network. The third component is a support component where paying customers can file tickets to a web system to ask questions or, depending upon how much you pay, can actually pick up the phone and call us and we'll help you by phone. These are the three main components that we will provide to customers.
>>So, are you doing other things to keep the development community healthy and growing?
>>Um, we're also looking into providing certification training. One of the things we see right now is that a lot of or almost all of Drupal developers are maxed out so a lot of companies are looking for talented people that can provide Drupal services to help them build their websites. There is a real shortage right now for these people so one of the things we would like to do is help the Drupal community grow by training certification, by sort of providing more developers. We're currently working on the first version of our product and we hope to launch it by the Fall, this Fall, Fall 2008.
>>And that will be supporting Drupal 6?
>>It will be using Drupal 6.
>>And you are also working on Drupal 7 at the same time you're trying to launch this new company.
>>Yeah, that's going to be, I'm personally in charge of Drupal 7 development.
>>Yeah, you're like Mr. Drupal, right?
>>Yes. Yes, I'm working with the Drupal community, in the Drupal community on Drupal 7.
>>And what's going to be some of the things the community will look forward to in that version?
>>There will be various interesting new things, like for example we already added a new testing framework which will make Drupal more viable, an even more viable platform for developers. We're also beginning to integrating what they call CCK and Views which allows people to create new custom content types using a web interface for all their having to do any programming which really makes it more accessible to build complex websites without having to be developer. So that's one of the things we're currently working on. We're also looking at new database construction layers and all of these things so pretty much all over the map.
>>Dries, thank you very much.
>>You're welcome.
The creator of the open-source publishing platform Drupal (a Webware 100 winner) is now starting a commercial venture around the code. The new company, Acquia, will open for business in the fall.
