News and announcements

After months of hard work, Acquia is now open for business! Starting today, everyone can connect their Drupal 6 site to the Acquia Network to take advantage of our services. Oh my!

The Acquia Network (previously code-named Spokes) is a hosted service that helps you with site management (update notifications, spam blocking, cron service, modification detection, etc) and provides real-time visibility into the health and usage of all your Drupal sites that are connected to the Acquia Network.

Second, the Acquia Network gives you access to Acquia's technical support team. Whether it is an installation question, a development question or a configuration question, our Drupal experts are ready to provide you with technical support. The kicker? Acquia Network subscriptions are available for every budget -- including a free community version. Give it a try!

Third, we are also releasing Acquia Drupal today. Acquia Drupal (previously code-named Carbon) is our Drupal distribution that bundles some of the best, most essential Drupal modules for building social publishing sites. Acquia Drupal is available for free, and all our bug fixes and improvements go straight to the module maintainers on drupal.org. Acquia Drupal defines the collection of modules that you can get technical support for.

A new top-level handbook will be added to Drupal.org this weekend, September 27-28, titled "Getting Involved." It will appear on the main Documentation landing page. We first posted about the new book back in August and have been working hard to get everything in to place to take it live.

For the creation of the new handbook, the "Developing for Drupal" and "About" handbooks will have some sections moved into the new book. The work will be happening this weekend, so those handbooks may be in a bit of disarray during the process. We are mostly moving existing pages or creating new ones so that no URLs will be harmed. Some pages may be rewritten to reduce duplication, but we are striving to not remove any pages.

What is it?

The driving idea behind the handbook is to not only tell people how to contribute to Drupal, but also to explain why, and encourage folks to explore contributing as a great way to actually learn and make their own Drupal lives better. The new handbook will cover everything from how to get an account on Drupal.org to how to use CVS.