There are geeks of many stripes, and for those of us in the digital content game, pledging allegiance to one of your favorite CMSs can feel a bit like declaring your house in HBO’s Game of Thrones.
Drupal, one of the more robust, mature and popular open-source CMSs on the market, has a storied and rich history and a devoted following. The Drupal platform and community is now nearly 17 years old and boasts of “more than 1,000,000 passionate developers, designers, trainers, strategists, coordinators, editors, and sponsors working together.” Drupal stands apart from other CMSs because it allows for rich and complex taxonomies and digital experiences, given its reliance on modules that enable maximum customization. The brands that leverage or have leveraged Drupal as a CMS include media stalwarts such as The Economist, Us Weekly and Popular Science.
While Drupal is a powerful and influential piece of software, it relies on a solid backbone and hosting infrastructure to scale and support it. That’s where Acquia, an enterprise-level hosting and services provider with specific expertise in Drupal setups, comes in.
Manifest was recently named Acquia’s 2017 Partner of the Year in the Americas region, so I snagged our technology director, Chris Miltzow, to understand a little bit more about what Acquia does for Manifest and our clients and why this partnership has been so successful.
“Acquia provides the service-level agreements and legitimacy required for a lot of our larger scale enterprise clients. So it’s kind of the perfect marriage of open-source and enterprise-grade technology,” he said.
The beauty of open-source platforms like Drupal and WordPress, of course, is that there’s an army of crowd-sourced modules and plug-ins that developers can take advantage of. The risk: Without professional support, you can be up a creek without a paddle when and if things go wrong with the open-sourced software you’re leveraging.
“Acquia guarantees the site uptime, they guarantee the infrastructure, the backups, the security and the patching of the core Drupal platform and also have the workflows between dev, test and production environments built,” said Miltzow.
For Manifest’s clients, this means their IT teams don’t have to worry about supporting and maintaining these environments and can instead focus their time and resources on other important projects, he said.
Check out one of our more recent projects, McCarthy Building Companies’ new site, built on Drupal and supported by Acquia.