After allowing Acquia Search to simmer in over two hundred and fifty beta tester kitchens for a few months, Acquia has taken the product and added it to its selection of hosted Acquia Network services.

What Is Acquia Search?

Acquia Search is a hosted search service for Drupal 6.x sites. Those who sign on for this SaaS approach push their Drupal content to Acquia's search servers, which use Apache's Lucene and Solr to index the content and handle the searches.

A hosted Search service that can be installed as a module on any Drupal 6 website has been launched by Acquia, the company that offers enterprise support for the open source content management system.

Search was released into beta in March 2009 and provides support for enterprise-scale site indexing and navigation.

By leveraging faceted search navigation, content recommendations and configurable results weighting, Acquia Search creates a rich index of site content and dramatically improves end-user search experience.

Marketing and brands are relationships between consumers and products, and relationship building is a two-way conversation. It is not the one-to-many broadcast commercial that defines a customer's relationship with a brand. Rather, it's the more informal -- often personal -- interactions with a product or company that result in long-term brand engagement. Technology, specifically the social web, has transformed marketers' ability to run lower cost, targeted marketing campaigns with measurable return on investment. The result is a new category of marketing: social marketing.

Social marketing is conversational. It's focused on facilitating interactions that are more directly connected to the process of relationship building with customers. And social marketing is, in all cases, propelled by social publishing technologies that turn spectators into member and contributors, and transform websites into community platforms for engagement with customers and future prospects.

Enterprise software vendor JackBe offers an example of this new strategy in action. JackBe sells enterprise mashup software to developers that enables them to use web services to connect internal and external data to create new, loosely coupled (or "mashed up") applications. Because this is a new approach in software development, part of JackBe's marketing agenda is to educate developers about mashups -- what they are, how to build them, and what applications are a good fit for this approach.

We've covered Acquia, which delivers commercial support for the powerful Drupal content management system a number of times. Acquia also delivers its own distribution of Drupal, and the company's co-founder (and also founder of Drupal) Dries Buytaert has now announced that the company has come out of beta testing with its version of Acquia Search. It's available at no cost as part of every Acquia Network subscription. If you're looking for a free, open source tool to run a web site, and need solid search and inexpensive support, the one-two punch that Drupal and Acquia offer may be just right for you.

When cofounder Jay Batson was putting together his start-up Acquia last year, he figured one advantage would help it stand out from all the other companies that manage Web content for business clients.

The software was free.

"Free is very disruptive," Batson said. "In a fragmented market, 'free' commands a lot of attention."

Batson's Andover company sells products, services, and technical support for Drupal, an open source software platform originally authored by company cofounder Dries Buytaert. Open source means it's built and maintained by a worldwide army of volunteer programmers, and unlike the pricey products offered by traditional software companies, is available for anybody to use at no cost. With Drupal, Acquia would be able to price its services without having to charge customers for any hefty software license fees.

When Acquia came out with the Drupal Stack (DAMP) Installer, many new users likely got very excited. You can use this installer to download and install everything you need to get a Drupal web content management environment up and running with a single click on a Mac or Windows system. But while it was a good way to get Drupal up and running quickly, it didn't have everything you may have wanted.

Acquia asked the community what new features they would like to see with the DAMP Installer and the community responded — multisite support. Acquia, of course, obliged.

Most Requested Feature

According to the results of a survey Acquia put out, the most requested feature for the DAMP Installer was to be able to set up multiple virtual hosts for multiple Drupal websites.

Once you have your Drupal environment up and running, you can create and configure new websites by simply clicking New in the Settings…Sites Tab.

WoodWing Software has a list of clients that reads like an international Who’s Who of the print industry. Acquia is the commercial arm that offers products and support for the open source software web content management system Drupal.

Last week, the two companies announced a new partnership that will see WoodWing's Enterprise 6 Content Publishing Platform ship with Acquia Drupal as the default content management system.

The result is an integrated package that gives publishers a tool that is simple to use as well as the ability to adopt print content for web users who are looking for interactive and engaging online experiences.

With all of the buzz encircling Acquia lately, we thought it prudent to share a review with our readers since we’ve never truly delved in to see what Acquia’s rendition of Drupal is made of.

For those of you unfamiliar with Acquia, we recommend you watch the following video that we shared previously that is an introduction to the product: Acquia Introduction

To get started, we decided to test the Acquia Drupal Installer stack which is available from the Acquia website and is a packaged of Apache, PHP, MySQL, PHPMyadmin and the Acquia Drupal version. The stack installer installs them all and allows you to quickly get to the nitty gritty and start playing.

For Drupal newbies, Christmas has come early. Acquia released the Acquia Drupal Stack Installer nicknamed the DAMP (Drupal + Apache + MySQL + PHP) stack.

With this package, you can download one item, double click and install all of the necessary components to get the Drupal Web CMS up and running.

Acquia's new CEO isn't the only major development for Drupal this week. Acquia also rolled out a new search service for Drupal Web sites, cloud-based hosting, and new Drupal application stacks. The plan is that new releases will give Acquia a greater competitive edge against commercial competitors while providing additional support for its open source code base.