Yesterday Acquia released their commercial supported version called Acquia Drupal and their online set of management tools and support bundled as the Acquia Network. After playing around with them a little, here's my first impressions.

Acquia Drupal is offered as a free download, being licensed as GPL. The installation process is fairly straightforward and doesn't differ from the standard Drupal one that much. You'll see you're able to enter some extra information (the Acquia subscription identifier and key) but the rest is identical. You can skip the Acquia information as you don't need a subscription to use it. After everything is set up you're left with a website very similar to what you would get with Drupal 6 (on which Acquia Drupal is based, by the way).

Once you log in you'll see the Administration Menu module being used, tweaked to show the Acquia logo and the current subscription information.

The admin menu.

Knowing they were supposed to ship a new theme (done by Top Notch Themes) and seeing Garland being used, I jumped to the themes menu. The new theme is there and it's curious why it's not enabled by default. It's called Acquia Marina and has 15 regions available. It looks like a good theme but there are some minor bugs as you can see in the screenshot I took of the Content types page and of the front page after enabling both sidebars.

Acquia Marina, the new theme.

Some columns could be bigger.

With both sidebars enabled, the content area is too small.

Acquia ships with a couple of essential modules which they picked up and are supporting. If you'll look on their website you'll see they say that "Acquia Drupal allows you to mix and match proven social publishing patterns that transform spectators into active contributors, including: Single and multi-user blogs, Community forums and threaded discussions, Social networks, Ratings and voting, Mashups, Wikis, Web content and much more...". With this in mind, looking at the list of modules they are shipping with you're left to wonder how you can make a mashup or a wiki with the current set of modules. Yes, I know, you can install them yourself and do a wiki.

While writing this someone asked the exact same thing on the forums. The answer was that you create a wiki content type and give selected roles the ability to edit it. Close, but I'm pretty sure it's not what most people would call a wiki system.

On the other hand their FAQ states that "The quality and supportability of contributed modules varies widely. Some contributed modules or third party themes may cause serious functionality conflicts, instability, performance degradation, or security vulnerabilities when installed on Acquia Drupal." and that you can pay them to review a module and they'll decide whether they can support it (and provide you with an yearly quote) or refuse.

A Drupal website will require a lot more modules than the current supported ones and will most likely have a custom theme. It's interesting to know what you can end up paying for 10 extra supported modules and a theme. And, if they don't support every module, every time there is an issue caused by one of those modules you're on your own. To me this doesn't sound exactly right but I understand what a pain can be supporting 30 extra modules for just one website. It can become very hairy given all the combinations of hosting platforms and all of the possible modules.

This will probably become a smaller issue than I think it is now because the list of modules they are supporting is expanding. Btw, here's what they are shipping with now:

• Administration Menu
• CCK (with the usual suspects: text, number, fieldgroup, options)
• Image modules (Image, Imagecache, Imagefield, Image attach)
• Markdown filter
• Pathauto and Token
• Google Analytics
• Mollom (Mollom is an antispam service built by Dries and Benjamin Schrauwen)
• Pdf version, Printer-friendly version and Send to a friend
• Views
• Voting API and Fivestar

Yep, no Panels, but it will probably be in the list once it's out of Alpha.

Now let's talk a little about the Acquia Network. You can get a free plan until the end of this year so go on and sign up if you want to play around with it. Once you are in you'll have to add a website which in turn will give you the Acquia subscription identifier and key and the Mollom keys. The next step is to connect your website to the Acquia Network, by entering your info in the Acquia settings page on your website and running cron.

You have the following areas:

1. Messages is where you see messages from the system. You can also subscribe to these messages by RSS and add rules to receive them by email in the Settings tab. By default you're getting all messages but you can add more people and choose what kind of messages they receive (you have urgent, important and notice types).

The messages page.

2. Health. For each website you have a dashboard with the uptime, the Mollom statistics and the site usage statistics. The uptime information also shows you when the last outage occurred and when it last updated.

The next tab in this section is Heartbeats. A heartbeat is a ping from your website to the Acquia network at a specified interval you define which is usually the interval you're running cron at. You can also have Acquia run cron for you. In this tab you see the last heartbeat and the recent outages and recoveries.

The health page.

Modifications shows you whether the code on the server was modified and also whether your server is supported. I'm not sure whether it does checksums or just looks at file names but I wasn't able to get it to detect my modifications. I deleted a file from a module and also changed another one but I couldn't get the system to update its information, showing me the last time was a couple of hours ago even if the last heartbeat was a minute ago. The modification check probably runs every couple of hours to avoid load. I'll leave the modified files and update this post if something changes.

Update: yes, it detected both modifications (about 6 hours later). Very nice.

Acquia detected both modifications.

The site profile shows some basic info about your server and the status of the modules. It also detects if you've installed unsupported modules.

3. Tasks is a simple to-do list with the exception that you can't create tasks. You only work with the ones created by the system for you and can delegate them to other people and comment on them.

Tasks manager.

4. Tickets is pretty self explanatory. I cannot comment more as it's not available with the free subscription.

5. Settings lets you update the site info, create message rules, add people and set Acquia to run cron for you. What's annoying is that you only get to run cron every 5 minutes or every hour. Some more intervals I think would be good.

6. Subscription shows details about your subscription such as what kind of support you can get, the number of tickets and the Acquia and Mollom keys.

Overall I like it and I'm excited of what this could mean for the entire Drupal ecosystem. I think however that the planned prices are a little high. The Community subscription, which is free now, will be 200 $ / year per site and you only get support in the forums. It's being targeted at blogs, family websites and non-profit groups. People with small budgets. I'm not sure a lot of people from this category will pay this amount of money (or more if you throw some extra modules in the mix). Then again I'm a programmer, not a business man, so maybe I am wrong.