Yesterday we took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and I followed up with a post about why Acquia Search matters for site visitors. We're still having some good discussions in the comments and the Twitter-sphere, but today I want to talk a bit more about the technical details. How does Acquia Search work, what does our infrastructure look like, and why is it a great deal for site owners?

Why will the visitors of your site care about Acquia Search? For a while now, I have Acquia Search installed on my personal site. To understand what Acquia Search can do for your site, have a look at what it has done for my site. While I have a very simple Drupal site, you should be able to experience some of the benefits of Acquia Search.

It's a big day for us at Acquia. We finally took the beta-wraps off of Acquia Search, and made it available commercially as part of the Acquia Network.

Okay, so that’s going a bit too far. But we’re getting ever closer to the dream module and theme updates and installs using a GUI in your browser!

Many thanks to cwgordon, Joshua Rogers, dww and especially chx for kicking some serious arse on this issue and getting us very close.

I was re-reading the October, 2008 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software last week. Gartner of course, is a key analyst for many enterprises evaluating IT strategies or making tactical decisions on software deployments. We've been speaking to them about the convergence of web content management and social software, something we call "social publishing".

On Friday, there is a Drupal meetup happening in Utrecht, The Netherlands. I'm planning to attend so looking forward to meet some of you there.

This weekend, 150+ people assembled at the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge for the first-ever Design4Drupal Camp. This was unique in that a large majority of the attendees were deeply involved in design - not just coding modules. While some of the usual suspects were there, many designers were meeting each other for the first time.

In this screencast, Bryan House from Acquia discusses Acquia Search with Michael Coté from RedMonk. Great demo, Bryan!

The first version of Drupal's automated test framework was developed in 2004 by Moshe Weitzman. It started as a simple wrapper around the SimpleTest unit testing framework.

I'm happy to have seen the good response to my "What shall we do about themes?" post. I'm particularly glad to see a bunch of self-described designers participating, and to see the thoughtfulness of the comments.

From the 50+ comments, a few consistent messages emerged (no editorial pen here; just consolidating / summarizing):