Acquia Drupal?
I have just been reading about the recently announced Acquia Drupal https://acquia.com/product-matrix
Based on their product matrix it sounds as though one may download Drupal 6.5 with most of the commonly desired modules - well tested - plus some additional custom Acquia features for free with user forum only support.
Could this be the answer that many churches are seeking to bypass the setup hassle and guesswork that a module will or will not work?
One may also upgrade to paid support and more features but for the average smaller church with a resident geek this would appear to be a "leg-up".
I presume that one may still further customize their Aquia Drupal?
What are the down-sides to this that I am missing, please?
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Pricing
Well, the first downside is that the FREE community version is only free for the first year. If you register/install before 2009, you get ONE YEAR for FREE. After that, it will cost ~$200/year (unless they change their model).
We can live with $200./yr
We can live with $200./yr for a continuously updated Drupal package. Sure sounds as though it could save me lots of valuable time.
Can you spot any modules commonly used in churches that are missing?
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
An Interesting Option
There are a number of modules you may way to use that end up being common on some church sites. For example, if you want to do a newsletter and have signups right on the church site you could use simplenews.
With many of the church sites I've touched there have been a number of modules outside the Acquia set. It really depends on what you want to do. When you're building a site think of what you want to do, not how to implement it. Then, if you're using drupal go look at the modules it would take to build that. So, first you need to ask what you want to have in a site.
For many sites it might be worth paying the $200/year for the peace of mind and updates.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
Looking at Acquia's roadmap,
Looking at Acquia's roadmap, I think if not now then in the long run Acquia Drupal will contain more and more of the "needed" modules. To me, what I think is a bigger advantage of Acquia is the Acquia Network product and Support.
While not for a church, I'm working on an Intranet project for a large organization. Basically, the criteria is looking at those CMS that offer the low cost advantage of open source, but also are supported commercially when support is needed. I think Acquia Drupal is perfect for those organizations that have a need for consistent support on their Drupal site and aren't able to maintain the needed Drupal experts within their own organization. In this case, they would have the current expertise to provide support internally...but they're assured if there is a significant staffing change they can tap into Acquia's resources.
BryanSD
CMS Report
A Church-Drupal Equivalent to Acquia?
Is it possible that someone on this Forum could offer a Church-Optimized equivalent to Acquia Drupal?
Same levels of support, same well-tested and stable package, same introductory and post-introductory fee structure, with modules optimized for Church rather than Business?
Any takers?
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
I'm interested in some of
I'm interested in some of that, but I don't have the skills for all of that. Acquia has put together a cracker-jack team. They are diverse in their skills, but very good at what they do. They have dedicated support personnel and dedicated programmers. They spent a lot of time and money up-front putting this together.
I don't think it can easily be duplicated in every way without expectation that the market is large enough to support it, but It would be cool to see something dedicated to the non-profit world at least if not specifically towards churches.
Partner Program
I'm not sure this would be a case of needing to have a church based company do the same thing as Acquia. First, I don't see how a church based company could get the level of talent Acquia has gotten. Without the same level of talent they couldn't put out the same level of product.
Plus, in my experience, there isn't much of a difference in the modules used by Acquias target audience and churches. While they may have a different site architecture and a different configuration of the modules, in some cases, the modules themselves remain the same.
What I would suggest is that church based companies enroll in Acquias partner program. They could then use Acquia as the backbone to church specific solutions. Best of both worlds?
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
If enough churches used
If enough churches used Acquia-Drupal perhaps they'd hire one of the consultants from this list to take care of their unique needs.
http://thebridgechristianlifecenter.com
Pastor David
Acquia
This isn't a knock against Acquia drupal, but I am running it for a personal website. For the updates it just gives you a link to download the newest version, you still have to untar and put it in the correct location. So its not an automated update. I'm actually getting ready to give CVS a shot on my home test server, I think that I can download the updates then possibly create a cron job that would check for a new version in the CVS repository(correct me if I'm wrong)? Dropping it into the CVS folder, but I have to do a little bit of poking to see exactly how it works.
It would be an awesome concept to create an auto updating Drupal installation, that you just setup when you want it to check for updates and off it goes.
In the works
Creating an auto updating system on a web server is a complicated beast. It's not hard to do but really hard to do securely. That's one of the reasons we don't have it in drupal at this point.
All that being said, it's in the works and will, hopefully, be included as part of drupal 7.
The big bonus with Acquia drupal is the support system. You have guaranteed support for your installation from experts. That's what you are really paying for.
Matt Farina
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.geeksandgod.com
www.superaveragepodcast.com
www.mattfarina.com
Security Issue
Allowing a website to update its own programming is a huge security issue. That's something that has to be considered when designing something like this, and it's not an issue limited to Drupal.
A lot of solutions I've seen for this sort of thing tend to execute scripted ftp or CVS to do the actual updates, even if the updating is triggered from the website interface. This introduces the challenge of building something that works on all supported platforms and operating systems.
Fully automatic updates are a cool concept, but not an easy thing to accomplish.
Micah