Installing Acquia vs standard Drupal 6
I’m constantly hopping around between Wordpress, Joomla! and Drupal, trying to figure out which suits particular projects best. Drupal has been promising for some now, but in terms of ‘out of the box’ functionality, it has been limited - on the flipside Joomla! components can be a bit ugly and hard to manipulate, and Wordpress is nice and lean, but very limited in scope. Increasingly too, i’m giving more and more thought to post-install considerations, like who the hell can I turn to when things go wrong?
Dries Buytaert, the main man behind Drupal, recently got a new start off up and running called Acquia. Basically, it’s a services company committed to providing paid support for Drupal and various Acquia developed modules developed on the Drupal platform. Acquia customers get access to a support area which - via a module on your own website - monitors the ‘health’ of your Drupal install, prompting updates and bug fixes where necessary. There are various support packages available, and Acquia’s Drupal install package is free to download and install at will.
So, how do the two versions compare side by side?
I downloaded and unpacked the Acquia Drupal package on my server, and went through installation steps. It was sooooo slow. This is probably down to the fact that Acquia comes with a heap of handy modules pre-selected for you, and when you install Acquia Drupal it installs these modules at the same time, but it really was a hog. Once you’re up and running though and have your Acquia keys installed, it seems to speed up a bit but the install process got me worried about future performance of it.
Anyhoo, I decided to install the basic Drupal 6 distro as a comparison, with no modules other than the core stuff which comes with Drupal. It was super fast, and I was up and running in about 90 seconds after i’d got my symlinks up and running (a handy feature of Drupal is the multisite feature which allows you to run heaps of sites from the same codebase, making updates very easy).
Acquia does have a nice navigation that drops down from the top of your window with quicklinks to all the important stuff - basic Drupal has never really had ‘easy to use’ navigation out of the box, you kinda have to make it yourself.
I’m sure Acquia will do for noobs who just want a site out of the box and aren’t really thinking of making web applications which scale, but for me i’m going to stick with basic ‘out of the box’ Drupal 6. I like having control of what modules I do and don’t need, especially at the install stage - i’m incredibly impatient!
In other geek news, Views 2 is now available for Drupal 6 - releases like this really do begin to give Drupal an edge over other heavy open source CMS solutions.
Edit: The lovely Admin menu I mention above in the Acquia Drupal distro is a Drupal Administration Menu module developed by Acquia themselves.
October 24th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I found Acquia some time ago but since it was a commercial-supported Drupal system I didn’t even care. It might be good for who doesn’t know a thing on web development and just wants to get started and not handle problems on themselves.
Nice enlightenment on Acquia! Thanks for making my mind up a little better about it. Cheers!
October 27th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
[...] used to having WP up and running in like an hour). Blogger and heavy Drupal user Hugh Durkin said it was kind slow and unwieldy in the Acquia version. What’s your take on Acquia? Let us know. We’re watching it very [...]
December 15th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
[...] of choice for thousands of developers worldwide. He also recently founded Acquia, which I recently blogged about. A bit of a visionary, it’s interesting to get an insight into one of the strongest brains [...]