Acquia, the commercial enterprise company behind the Drupal open source content management platform, has announced several web developer-focused additions to its Acquia Network knowledge base.
The latest enhancements are designed to complement Acquia Cloud (the Drupal-optimized hosting resource for developers) and are said to empower subscribers with self-guided training on Drupal concepts and best practices; site testing under a variety of traffic load conditions; an Internet marketing report specific to Drupal; and enhanced vision and proactive management of site configuration issues.
New offerings include "Insight", a tool to provide dynamic metrics for a wide variety of website elements to identify and troubleshoot problems in real time via an audits modules that analyzes code changes and offers fixes when needed.
Also included is "Drupalize.Me", an extensive library of tutorial videos that speed the acquisition of key Drupal skills. Alongside this new element, "Blitz" is a self-service load and performance-testing platform that enables web developers to deploy high-performance websites with the ability to easily integrate an iterative load-testing process into the development cycle.
In addition, Acquia is announcing the availability of the Acquia Apps Market in Q4, 2011, utilizing the Acquia Network API. The Acquia Apps Market allows software vendors and developers to offer their services and applications to the more than 50,000 Drupal websites served by the Acquia Network. The Acquia Apps Market includes a store where Drupal users will be able to purchase applications developed by third parties.
"Acquia has the broadest set of relationships with organizations that provide software, tools, and education for Drupal, and I'm pleased that we continue to strengthen the Acquia Network with these resources," said Peter Guagenti, vice president of Services at Acquia.
Ajit Sancheti, cofounder of Mu Dynamics, the company behind Blitz, praised the move. "Being integrated into the Acquia Network is further proof of the validity of Blitz for developers in need of performance testing. Acquia's platform offers users a powerful set of capabilities to build websites. When combined with Blitz, application developers get the ease and flexibility needed to integrate performance testing into continuous integration without the addition of significant cost, time, or complexity."
