Acquia provided new details on plans to deliver a commercially supported distribution and value-added network services based on the popular Drupal open source social publishing system. The company also threw open the doors on Acquia Projects, a collaborative environment for Drupal community members to participate in the direction of forthcoming Acquia products and services.
 
Acquia plans to ship a commercially supported distribution of Drupal, code-named “Carbon.” The Carbon distribution will include the Drupal 6 core release and essential extension modules for assembling social publishing sites and applications. With Carbon in hand, web developers will have fully integrated and tested building blocks for user management, web content management, single or multi-user blogs, wiki collaboration, discussion forums, user-generated content, social networking and more. In keeping with the spirit of the open source development model, all Acquia-developed Drupal code will be freely licensed under the GPL v2 license and the company will work continuously to merge new features and patches into the main line Drupal project through the established community process.
 
“Having a commercially supported distribution like Carbon is an essential step in the maturation of the Drupal project,” said Dries Buytaert, Acquia co-founder and Drupal creator and project lead. “I am personally committed to ensuring that this distribution works to the benefit of the entire Drupal community.”
 
Acquia plans to provide a range of maintenance and support subscriptions designed to meet the requirements of both individual developers and organizations utilizing the Carbon distribution. Acquia subscriptions will enable customers to harness the full open source power of Drupal without sacrificing the accountability and support of commercial software.
 
Finally, as part of the initial Acquia subscription offerings, the company plans to introduce an enhanced electronic update notification service, code-named “Spokes,” that will automatically provide users of the Acquia distribution with specific and actionable information to maintain system performance, security, and stability. While the current Drupal update module provides unfiltered notifications for all Drupal updates, the Spokes update notification service will provide notifications for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia.

“We are on a mission to make Drupal the industry standard open source social publishing system,” said Jay Batson, Acquia co-founder. “For that to happen, we must offer the accountability and support businesses have come to expect, and Carbon and Spokes are just the first step in meeting this demand.”
 
“We’re seeing a clear convergence of content management, social media, and web frameworks in the marketplace,” said Geoffrey Bock, Lead Analyst at Gilbane. “Drupal is at the center of this trend, and backing from Acquia will solidify that position.”
 
The Acquia subscription offerings, Carbon distribution, and the Spokes update notification service are expected for public release in the second half of 2008. To learn more, and to participate in the direction of these and forthcoming Acquia development projects, visit http://acquia.com/projects.

For more information on Acquia please contact Jena Murphy JMurphy@citigatecunningham.com at Citigate Cunningham.