It's nice to see the future plan discussed here. This is my wishlist on Acquia Drupal: http://www.isriya.com/node/2224/my-first-test-drive-on-acquia-drupal

I'm looking forward to using Acquia-fied drupal in the future.
One absolute need I have, as a developer in an enterprise environment (where having commercial support is a must, so Acquia is awesome) is being able to use our existing ActiveDirectory/LDAP infrastructure with any new applications we bring in.

If possible, I would love to see the next release of Acquia have that as a core or optional module.

I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who needs to use LDAP with their applications, and finds it as a stumbling block a lot of the times.

Thank you!

As a primarily enterprise Drupal admin/developer, I'm very excited about the enterprise possibilities that Acquia will bring to Drupal. Here's my take, as a Drupal intranet developer in the healthcare industry, of what I need in order to be able to really push Drupal as a true enterprise solution:

1. A reliable and secure manner with which to set up a dev -> qa -> production workflow that does not involve node id hacks. I know there's some work going on in this area, but I was a little concerned not to see any mention of it on this roadmap. This could be addressed on a simpler level if there were a reliable method of exporting/importing all Drupal content objects (users, profiles, nodes, comments, views, etc.) at once so that I could simply promote my qa instance to production by updating content. This is the single biggest stumbling block for me to getting Drupal accepted as a true enterprise solution on the admin side of the house (the user side is discussed next).
2. There needs to be a true wysiwyg solution that handles images and intrasite linking (think page browser) as easily as an office package. I was disappointed to see this is being deferred until 2009 and/or Drupal 7. This is the single largest stumbling block I have with my user population to getting my Drupal sites widely used. I actually have to provide MS Office Word files of pages for some users to edit and then send back to me for updating the site!
3. Somewhat related to the previous point, there has to be an Office document (both ODF and Microsoft formats) import/export (at least for word processor and spreadsheet files) capability. It wouldn't matter if I could design a Drupal site that would serve people coffee and cake while working on their documents, their only question to me would still be "but can I import my word docs?". I say this is related to the previous item because if there were a wysiwyg editor that users were comfortable with, this would be less of a problem. Though it wouldn't completely disappear as there's still a significant need for offline content creation capabilities and WLW simply isn't accepted in the enterprise yet(if ever).
4. And finally, true document management. This may resolve itself once the file handling framework has been ironed out (the file framework module looks very promising). And for those that would say it already exists, I have to respond that a "document" content type with a filefield and some metadata fields is not true document management (think Alfresco or Knowledgetree). There has to be provisions for handling file revisions in addition to the node revisions of the metadata as well as namespace collisions and true file access control that doesn't depend on knowing how to independently configure apache in a specific way. There also needs to be the option of storing the files in the db or the filesystem.

Those are the main problems I have to solve before really pushing to have Drupal replace our sharepoint infrastructure.

Two other, somewhat minor issues (and I say minor since there are currently acceptable manual or contributed module solutions for them), are media handling and ldap integration.

That's my $1.00 worth (inflation don't ya know)... ymmv.

Hi,

I echo the request for LDAP. One of our largest corporate clients has said this will be a key factor in considering Drupal for their Intranet.

Any estimates you can give as to when this might be supported would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

- Seth
Charles River Web Inc.

E-commerce integration and subscription management are also considered highly valuable by our client.

Please advise about these as well.

Thanks,

- Seth
Charles River Web, Inc.

I do not see a WYSIWYG editor? Is it hiding or isn't there one? It is a key, required feature for many uses.

Organic Groups Subscriptions(subscriptions_og) integrates 2 modules you are considering, if you are not going to use notifications... will OG be only having basic emailing features?

My suggestion.....

I agree with the above suggestions about having push button setups. Click on Wiki setup and the modules needed for that would be activated, or Social Collaboration site, or ....

But I know that this takes time to package and test.

What I would suggest (to reduce the testing time) is that your Drupal experts take a 1/2 day each week and use the time to write a data sheet on a Drupal config and then throw the data sheet with a "NO SUPPORT - USE AT YOUR ON RISK" notice up into a wiki.

Your users can become the testers of the sheet, and the most popular can be considered for inclusion and test in your next releases.

Even though the data sheets will be made with the Acquia config in mind they will be useful to the entire Drupal community.

Seems like some essential security-related modules missing for corporate use. We need to use:
Password Policy
Login Security
Automated logout + countdown timer

Also important:
Xmlsitemap
FCKeditor
Image FUpload
Calais (also requires RDF)
NAT (seems to be the best way of joining nodes when not using CCK)
Scheduler
Taxonomy Defaults
Term Display

Quite curious about how strongly CCK would be recommended over custom content type/modules, especially from a performance viewpoint.

I think Acquia Drupal will need powerfull users' profiles in order to build community site and I think Content Profile is the right candidate as it unleash the power of CCK for profiles.

Also, it would be great that acquia marina had a special template to have nice profiles out of the box.

How about Content Templates? Without Content Templates, CCK is pretty tough to style for the front end designer/developer. Unless there's another module that I'm unaware of that does something similar?

Thanks!

Tim

I think a solid Ubercart integration is needed to really expand the market for Drupal. I know we at ISL will be working with Ubercart's dev version for Drupal 6 for one client, and would be happy to contribute what we can to this having just successfully used Ubercart on a Drupal 5 site. There is also the strategic advantage of marketing a platform that can support robust e-commerce.

Webform module with Mollom submission support would be very valuable. Many clients ask for simple data collection forms on their sites and webform makes this pretty painless on-the-fly additions.

Jeffrey Dalton Design
Providing Elegant Drupal Solutions
http://www.jeffreydalton.info

Thanks for your opinions the modules - your feedback really helps us out. And I like your ideas for push button set ups and content templates. I'd like to talk some of you to hear what you think in more detail. I'll follow up via email.

We'd also love to hear your thoughts about the Acquia Network. Does it have what you need? What else do you think we should include? Please add your comments to the Network roadmap page or take this quick survey - whatever is easier for you.

It might be a bit off-topic, however I cannot help noticing that there are still some very-important/mostly-used modules in a non-Drupal 6 released state.

Views, Panels, Taxonomy access are some examples.

My point is that you rush in a new Drupal version without paying so much attention on the modules, at least on the most used modules. For enterprise environments it's ugly.

Re. wizard...

It would seem that having an installation wizard that asks intelligent questions about how these things should be configure could help new users achieve a more useful initial installation of Drupal.

Just to observe that often at the time of inital installation you aren't completely clear what you need (or perhaps you don't fully understand how the options presented by the wizard correspond to your requirements), so IMO there needs to be a way of re-activating the wizard for an already-installed site (also useful if you hit the wrong option during install!). If done like this then a wizard could help users understand some of the possibilities/opportunities for their AD site even after installation. For a first time user, setting up CCK/Date/Calendar/Views etc. for event-type nodes is a bit of a burden. The flip side though is that often things need tweaking slightly to get them just right, and if the wizard "hides" all the complexity from the user then they won't be any the wiser in terms of how to modify the settings to get just where they want. I guess this is where a comprehensive built-in help system would be of great value.

What about a contribution to the Drupal source base, to support Oracle databases? You seem to be going after the enterprise market, in the sense that you offer the kinds of service and support options that enterprise clients seek out, before committing to a particular technology. Oracle is the RDBMS of choice for many, many enterprises. Without support for Oracle, it's tough to envision Drupal getting a lot of traction on the enterprise level, in the kinds of application domains for which it would otherwise be ideally suited (as a vehicle for distributing corporate communications to employees, as a portal for collecting/organizing the resources on a corporate intranet, as a team blog or project status builder, and so on).

Thanks.

Customizable Themes...

As a bullet point in your list of requirements for a theme, I'd like to suggest that you add:

* easily customizable by the end user.

First things that come to mind are:

- layout - can I change the basic layout from 2-col to 3-col? (not just by how I assign blocks, but by setting an option in the theme.)

- colors - could you give me a couple dozen great color sets for me to choose from, as well as letting me plug in my own color codes? refer to how Garland does this.

- graphical elements - I want a wide thick header on every page. or I want a special background behind each of my main nav links.

- and whatever else the creative minds behind the themes come up with!

The reason I'd like to see this is to help people who aren't hiring a professional designer get something relatively unique with minimal effort. As soon as you include a great looking theme in core, loads of sites will start using it, and it loses some of its appeal. It can retain its appeal longer if it's highly and easily customizable.