Acquia Inc. podcasts

Erica Ligeski, Marketing Engineer on the Acquia.com website is another of the many Drupalists with a non-technical background. Her path took her from performance and dance, to arts management, to total geekery! Just like me, at some point along the way she needed a website for an arts project and fell in love with Drupal. The rest is history. Acquia U Erica was one of the very successful first group put through the Acquia U Drupal training program. "Successful" in this case means that all the trainees were hired as full-time Acquians following the course. More about Acquia U: About Acquia U Acquia U video The making of a Ubie Acquia U graduates Module shout out: ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A Erica's favorite Drupal module is the Konami Code Module, which adds secret Easter eggs to Drupal websites, just like the one the Konami company added to many of its video game releases. Drupal Training Resources If you'd like to know more about this Drupal thing or up your game, here's a few resources that can help: training.acquia.com lists Acquia's own training courses. Don't miss Hello Drupal!, an introductory Drupal course free for anyone to download and use! buildamodule.com offers well-structured, task-oriented, video-based Drupal training from beginning concepts through to advanced coding in Drupal. drupalize.me is another excellent video-based Drupal resource, containing hours of material covering every aspect of Drupal development. Free trials of buildamodule.com and drupalize.me are available as part of some Acquia Network Subscriptions. erica_ligeski_final.mp3

New shows, new gear The Acquia podcast crew has been hanging out at HQ in Burlington, Massachusetts this week recording a bunch of new material. The newest member of our team is the appropriately named Deadkitten wind protector by Røde microphones. I can't think of a better one for Drupal podcasts! New release schedule: Welcome to Wednesday We're moving our weekly podcast releases to Wednesdays, but we didn't want to leave you hanging this weekend. We have a bunch of great stuff coming your way in the next months, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here's a few folks at Acquia answering the question, "What is Drupal?" Thanks Erica Ligeski, Angie Byron, Tim Hilliard, and Kevin Hankens for helping out this week! No Drupal core was hacked during the making of this podcast. what_is_drupal_teaser.mp3

I also thought of calling this episode of our Four Freedoms podcast series "The interesting journey of a company producing proprietary software being involved in an open source project," ... not so catchy. Or maybe "Why business and openness do not have to be enemies." The point is that on February 12, 2013, Opera Software announced that it was dropping its own, proprietary rendering engine in favour of the open source WebKit engine. I wanted to know more about that decision and the consequences going forward. What I discovered is a company with a commitment to open standards, knowledge sharing, liberal licensing, and a long-term history of actions to back those claims up. This podcast is roughly half of a wide-ranging and interesting conversation I had with with Bruce Lawson and Andrea Bovens from Opera Software at the 2013 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This was recorded on February 26, 2013 on the trade show floor. The recording quality suffers somewhat from the background noise of the other 63,000 people who were at the MWC with us. I couldn't get them to be quiet. About my guests Bruce Lawson is in the Developer Relations Department and the Web Standards Department at Opera Software. His elevator pitch: "I evangelise using open standards on the web." Bruce co-wrote the very first book on HTML5 with Remy Sharp: Introducing HTML5, published by New Riders. Contact Bruce at brucel@opera.com. Follow him on Twitter @brucel. Andreas Bovens, with Opera since 2007. QA Engineer, then Web Evangelist. Since 2009, Group Leader Developer Relations, also Web Standards Group and Product Manager for Opera extensions. You can contact Andreas at andreasb@opera.com. Follow him on Twitter @andreasbovens. "The web isn't just a mechanism for looking at pictures of kittens" While we were teasing out the interesting position Opera Software occupies as a proprietary, commercially successful software company that also makes large contributions to web standards, freely licensed online learning materials, and software libraries, Bruce pointed out that the Opera browser, despite being proprietary software, also affects social change and benefits people in developing countries around the world: "I believe that we affect social change using our proprietary engine and will continue to do so with open source. Tens of of millions of Opera users would have no access to the web without [Opera products] because they run on ancient feature phones that are the only things affordable in certain developing economies. The web isn't just a mechanism for looking at pictures of kittens. For many people, the web browser is access to a doctor or medical advice. It is access to the outside world in a closed-off regime. It is a school when you can't afford one. That to me is what we do. That is why I love working for Opera, because we literally bring that about for tens of millions of people every day." Open wins the web The old way people thought things would work was to "win the web" with proprietary formats, markup, and more. Internet Explorer and Netscape tried to do that in the early 2000s by "embracing, extending, and extinguishing" ... There was markup and functionality that was browser-specific, some websites only worked in a specific browser. Opera had to create its own, proprietary rendering engine, called "Presto", "to prove that we could be commercially successful using and evangelizing open web standards." This paved the way for using open source, standards compliant code and being commercially successful at the same time. Though it seems commonplace today – thanks to examples like Firefox, Google and many others beyond the world of web browsers (Red Hat, Acquia, Drupal shops galore) – it was a radical idea at the time. Today we can say 'open wins the web.' "We took the decision that rather than paying engineers to maintain feature parity with other rendering engines," says Bruce, "It seemed to be to us a much better way of using our resources (and to

Robert Douglass, Director of Products at Commerce Guys, the originators and maintainers of Drupal Commerce sat down with me this week. We talked about how content, community, and commerce relate and help each other and why Drupal is the best platform to provide you with the digital elements of your users' experience of your online presence. Commerce Guys, in partnership with Acquia also has the support mechanisms that you need to succeed with Drupal and Commerce: from architecting your site, to training your developers, to the ongoing enterprise support that you would need for a serious store in the long term. Why is Drupal Commerce so great? "It's principally great because of the strengths of Drupal. You get the flexibility to create the web presence that you want to reflect your brand with a full-fledged commerce system behind that. You've got this cohesive experience between content, community, and commerce." Content + Commerce The majority of the early internet commerce experiences, "just resembled a catalog of products," but it was only revolutionary in terms of the access to goods the internet was adding to a classic shopping model. "But the modern web experience is much richer and people expect a lot more. The way they use the internet has evolved quite a bit. People spend a lot of their time online learning, expressing themselves, figuring out what their tastes are, looking at the world around them and interacting with it. The retailers online who are having success tie into that overall experience, the rich experience that people have with the online world and ways to build brand-recognition and buy in," to turn readers, visitors, or fans into customers. It's not about 'I'm going to go shopping now, where's the next online store?' Retailers need to "take the customer on a journey that might introduce a concept or an idea (or a trend, fashion, look, or a device) ... in some way that really builds the case for its desirability ... and then offers the chance for retail." You can see this trend connecting the "real" world and the online world, too, with the advent of things like QR-codes and instant downloads and content delivered via bluetooth or near-field-communication from a poster to your smart phone. All of this goes towards creating comprehensive brand experiences and opening doors for people you hope will become your customers. Community + Commerce "When people say 'community' or 'social engagement', what they're really talking about is the ability for a person to communicate with others – your tastes, your activities, express who you are – and take this natural desire to define who we are and interact with our friends and to let the natural buying signals percolate out from that." "If I check in somewhere, there can be two reasons I do that: either I want people to be able to find me or I want people to see where I've been so they can ponder my exquisite taste." :-) Referring to Drupal's wide-ranging integration with practically every aspect of today's social web from Pinterest to the Open Graph and beyond, "Most eCommerce systems are still struggling with the concept of how they get to content management to begin with and don't have social functionalities built in. Drupal's got that built in. Drupal is inherently social. We've always been at the forefront of every new innovation on the web like that." If you are running Drupal and have the Open Graph enabled, it allows you to be in control of what check-ins to your locations, stores, or events look like on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and so on. "That's a really great example of how being able to control your content, and being able to tie into communities can aid the commerce experience." What else do I get choosing Drupal Commerce? "Drupal is an optimal collaboration platform, community platform, sharing platform ... People build all sorts of sites on Drupal that utilise user-generated content. There's a natural fit for user-generated content to

Heather James, Acquia's Manager of Learning Services, has been in and around Drupal since the version 4 days. She says people new to Drupal "have an easier time at this stage coming to Drupal" than they did 6 years ago. Nonetheless, her early experiences learning how to use Drupal are still reflected by the questions people ask learning Drupal today. This, combined with her excitement about Drupal's potential and her background as an educator, motivated her to become a Drupal trainer. She is passionate about education ("When you're teaching, you're building a bridge from what people know to what they don't know.") and says about her job at Acquia, "I feel like I have a patron who helps me do the things I like to do, which is get out there and teach people." This podcast was recorded in June, 2012, at the Oxford Drupal Education Camp. Hello Drupal! Heather is the proud maintainer of Hello Drupal!, a free course (download the course and trainer materials here!) designed to "help us communicate the basic concepts of Drupal to the type of person who would come to a Drupal camp without knowing anything". She can often be found giving this and other courses at Drupal community events. The group in Ireland who put it together in its initial form (including Heather), called it the "n00b nursery", but somehow that name didn't catch on. The course is designed to be presented to mixed (skill, knowledge, and experience levels) groups of people interested in Drupal. Once they have done either the 90 minute or 3 hour version of the course, they're "qualified" to really benefit from other sessions at a Drupal Camp, for example. They will then know enough of the jargon and understand what is going on under Drupal's hood to take it from there. Other Drupal training courses Acquia offers include "Drupal in a Day", "Drupal for Project Managers", "Drupal in a day for Developers" (for people familiar with other frameworks, languages, or systems to get started with Drupal), and more. Heather writes (great stuff) about Drupal Heather writes regularly about Drupal training, Drupal in education, building teams, and more. She's been writing a new, killer blog series recently called "Drupal How-To". Go check out these excellent posts: Drupal How-To: Basics, Tweak the Defaults for Adding Images to Your Site Drupal How-To: Get Inline Images on Your Drupal Site Drupal How-To: Responsive or Adaptive Images She's done a bunch more good blog posts, too. Follow @hjames and @learningdrupal on Twitter to keep up with what Heather is up to. Links Flexinode rears its once-beautiful head once again. For Drupal history buffs: http://drupal.org/project/flexinode Views, Drupal's UI-based query-builder: http://drupal.org/project/views Hello Drupal!: http://training.acquia.com/hellodrupal Acquia Drupal training courses: http://training.acquia.com/courses Acquia is Hiring a Director of Learning Credits, thank you's Additional voiceovers provided by Moshe Weizman, Michael Hofmockel, Francesca Ballarin, Victoria McGuire, and Oliver McGuire. Thank you! heather_james_final.mp3

Mark Sonnabaum, performance engineer at Acquia, comes to open source on a straighter path than some ... despite his university degree being in music composition! He was a systems administrator at the University of North Texas and chose Drupal – in the Drupal 4 era – as the replacement for a mish-mash of legacy, static systems at the university. Today, he is a contributor who has made significant improvements to how Drupal performs for all of us. This interview was recorded in 2012. The recording was not made under ideal conditions. Apologies for the audio quality. The road to contribution If his job got him involved in building an early Drupal distribution – a rarity at the time, unlike today – multisite infrastructure and more, it was the community who then pulled him to becoming a (significant) contributor to Drupal. DrupalCon D.C. in 2009 opened his eyes to "how much there was to learn" and there's been no stopping him since then. Mark was a co-maintainer of the command-line Drupal toolkit, Drush, with Moshe Weizman. For those of you unfamiliar with the powers of Drush, go have a look: it saves you a lot of clicking around the Drupal UI to make configuration changes and more, putting real control of Drupal at your fingers on the command line, right where developers prefer to have it. Performance, performance, performance Mark's real passion as a developer is performance. As the maintainer of the Drupal XHProf Module, he is on a crusade for developers to include performance in their fundamental mindset and approach ... and have XHProf on at all times! XHProf is a PHP performance monitoring library developed by Facebook, which, according to Mark, should be a part of every developer's toolkit, just like a good debugger. As a performance engineer, Mark works with other engineering teams at Acquia. His work on Enterprise Drupal Gardens led to performance improvements of 50% across the Drupal Gardens platform and him becoming a Drupal core contributor. Many of the performance problems he discovered, turned out to be core issues in Drupal. The fixes for those have turned into Drupal 7 and 8 core patches and improvements. Working at Acquia Mark says about working at Acquia, "I never lack interesting problems that need solving." Credits, thank you's Additional voiceovers provided by Francesca Ballarin, Victoria McGuire, and Oliver McGuire. Thank you! mark_sonnabaum_final.mp3

This is part three of a conversation I had with Anthony Ferrara – PHP core contributor, security expert, and Senior Architect at NBCUniversal – at the PHP BeNeLux '13 conference. In part one of our conversation, we talked about open source as an ethos and how it affects business. In part two, we talk about what the Four Freedoms mean to us as IT and web professionals, and the growing impact and influence of open source software. Anthony Ferrara is a prominent member of the PHP community and creates many free tutorials and materials "to help people understand complex topics in simple ways". His blog, about PHP, security, performance and general web application development is at blog at http://blog.ircmaxell.com/ and his YouTube Channel is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ircmaxell. "PHP is as secure as any other major language" "The first fundamental misconception about PHP is that people think PHP isn't secure. That is absolutely not true. PHP is as secure as any other major language. The problem with PHP is also the problem with every single other language: you can write insecure code in it," he underscores his point, "but that's a fundamental problem in every single programming language. The job of security is not up to the language. It's not up to the tools that you use. It's up to the people that use the tools. Even the best tools can be misused and lead to major security issues." Rails, Java, Javascript and other languages have all had vulnerabilities over the years. "If you find a language that has not had a vulnerability of some shape or form, I'll show you a language that hasn't been used." Developing securely Every single developer need to think about security when writing code. This doesn't mean being a security expert, but everyone should be aware of security and best development practices. Using many of the PHP frameworks and tools that have come out in the last few years, "It actually becomes quite easy to do security and not have to think about it." This can lead to its own problems, of course: "If you depend too much on those tools, those tools become weak points." Anthony suggests being pro-active with your tools and I'd add you should never trust them blindly. If you do, you lose one of the advantages of working in open source, the freedom to study and understand your code. Fixing vulnerabilities in PHP and elsewhere Anthony describes how newly discovered vulnerabilities get reported and handled in so-called "white hat" and "black hat" scenarios. The "white hat scenario" involves someone discovering a problem and reporting it responsibly (privately) to the security team, giving them a chance to fix it before releasing the technical details of the problem. The dangerous scenario is when a vulnerability is discovered by the security team in the aftermath of a security breach of some kind. "You have a black hat, a 'bad guy' who finds that vulnerability and they start using it to attack sites and we learn about it after it's already being used in the real world. That's when you can tell the difference between proactive and reactive projects: The proactive project will be able to identify it quickly, get a fix, and get it out there and then communicate the level of severity and get the problem fixed in the real world. Rails, Drupal, and PHP core do this very well." The security equation: everybody is part of it The project maintainers or security team are only half of the equation. As Anthony puts it, "A project can fix a vulnerability within five minutes of it being reported and release a new version, but if nobody upgrades for six years, what good is it?" It comes down to cooperation between the project security teams, "who we trust to handle these issues appropriately and release the new versions," and the developers, system administrators, and users also have to "play their part", drop everything and fix the problem right now." Open source gives you reason to trust "I think that's the amazing thing about open

PHP core contributor, security expert, and Senior Architect at NBCUniversal, Anthony Ferrara and I sat down to talk at the PHP BeNeLux '13 conference. In part one of our conversation, we talked about open source as an ethos and how it affects business. In this part, we talk about what the Four Freedoms mean to us as IT and web professionals, but also the growing impact of open source software outside the world of software developers. Anthony Ferrara is a prominent member of the PHP community and contributes a great deal of tutorials and materials "to help people understand complex topics in simple ways". His blog, about PHP, security, performance and general web application development is at blog at http://blog.ircmaxell.com/ and his YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/ircmaxell. Opportunities and trickle-down "When I was working on the Joomla project, open source gave me the tools to advance myself, it allowed me to contribute back, to be mentored and to learn, to gain experience in a non-professional setting that I can directly apply to a professional setting. Without those freedoms, I would have never have gotten the experience to be nearly as valuable in a professional context as I am today." "I can talk about how my life as a developer is improved by open source, how my tools are incredible because they're open source, but at the end of the day, I think it's really more about how the world benefits from open source. That's the most powerful concept: Yes, it helps tons of developers that Drupal is open source, but at the end of the day, developers aren't the ones using most of these sites." The general public doesn't know "or want to care" how sites are built. "They shouldn't even know the word Drupal, because what matters at the end of the day are the experiences that are built for them. Open source allows us to build better and faster experiences for the end user." Anthony says the benefits to developers of using open source "trickle down" to the end users in better experiences on the web. The perception of freedom v. actual freedom Open source software touches many people every day and most never realize it. You are likely to encounter a product of the Four Freedoms in one or more of the following kinds of systems today: GPS navigation systems, 'smart' phones, ATMs (bank 'cash machines'), network routers, entertainments systems, and much more. "The sheer usefulness of open source" means that we can install different versions of the operating system on our phones if they run an open source OS. "Ten years ago, the mass public had zero idea that something like this was possible. Even today, most people don't know about Linux, but they know that they can jailbreak their iPhone. That is the perception of freedom when there isn't any. So when you go to platforms like Android, Firefox OS, [or Ubuntu], and you see these mobile phones, the Four Freedoms are making an impact on everybody's lives in a meaningful way. I think this is going to continue to grown in the lives of every day people. Open source and innovation Open sourcing innovations lets others recognize your good ideas, put them to good use, learn from them, and improve on them. Inspired by your idea, someone else might make something else new; "innovation begets innovation" as it were. "Amazing things happen because there are people putting in time and effort and then saying 'Do with this what you will.' Open source is saying 'I value my intellectual property, but I want people to benefit from it.' You can sell it, of course, that's a valid use case; but by sharing it, you're allowing other people to benefit and build upon it." When others build up on your ideas, you can often benefit from their improvements as much or or as they have benefitted from your contribution, too! "The chances of me creating the next huge innovation are relatively small ... the next breakthrough, Web 3.0; the chances of me doing it by myself is almost nothing. But the chance of

I met PHP core contributor and security expert Anthony Ferrara at the PHP BeNeLux '13 conference. He is a Senior Architect at NBCUniversal on a team that works a lot with Drupal. In this first part of a three-part interview, we sat down to talk about open source as an ethos and how it affects business. In the next two parts of our conversation, we talked about the consequences and practice of the Four Freedoms that define open source software, and the security of PHP as a programming language. I'll be releasing those soon and updating the links here, too. Anthony is a prominent member of the PHP community and contributes a great deal of tutorials and materials "to help people understand complex topics in simple ways". His blog, about PHP, security, performance and general web application development is at http://blog.ircmaxell.com/ and his YouTube Channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/ircmaxell. The slippery slope to open source Like many open source contributors, Anthony got his first small hit of open source (helping a friend with a website, in his case), then went a little deeper (built his own website). The point of no return was probably when he figure out how to fix performance limits on his site and gave the code back to the open source project in question, Joomla. Once they saw his code, the platform's maintainers asked him to come in and help. "In about 6 months," explains Anthony, "I went from releasing my first bit of open source code to becoming a core contributor to a major open source platform." He worked on security, maintenance, and performance for the Joomla project for a few years. Antony has now been a PHP core contributor for roughly two years at this point, but also advises and contributes to other open source projects, including Drupal 8. Experts are made not born To make a meaningful contribution to an open source project, you don't need to be a "rockstar". Good ideas and honest efforts make a real difference. "There is so much work to be done. The people doing the bleeding-edge stuff don't usually have time to do other stuff. Even if you started with a platform yesterday, you can make meaningful contributions." Beyond code there is still so much to do: quality assurance, testing, bug reports and validating bug reports by reproducing the problems. "People underestimate how much of a help that all is," and the impact that kind of help can have on a project. It's not about being a star,"The people who are 'famous' weren't famous a year ago. The reason they got famous was because they went forth and put the effort in. They stood up and said: 'I'll do that'. They're not some complete genius who the community picked out and said, 'That's the guy we want to follow.' It's because they have put in that time, that effort, and they have earned that respect." Experts are made not born. Open source and proprietary coexistence "I use a variety of things from open source video editors to programming languages. I'm a huge supporter of Linux. Until recently, I only owned Linux computers. I recently had to adopt a Windows machine, but not out of choice ..." he says while making an inscrutable expression. "I am a huge believer in the open source movement, but I am also a believer in open source and proprietary living side-by-side. I am not a zealot; I am pragmatic. One example is large data. When you get to extremely large database sizes, it doesn't make sense for the open source community to spend time and effort trying to support that when there's maybe only a couple hundred users in the world who need that kind of scale. In niche markets, proprietary software can be a benefit to open source projects by alleviating some of the burden of edge case support." Now that companies like Red Hat, Acquia, and Canonical offer commercial support for open source projects and "s long as the corporate backing and the open source project play nice together, the only people who win are everybody." Building better with open source The

Moshe Weizman is Acquia's Director of Research and Development in the Office of the CTO. Over the years, he's built many of the development tools that have been instrumental in Drupal's growth and success. Now, alongside his ongoing contributions to Drupal itself, he works with Acquia's product teams from conception, through architecture and prototyping, to helping coordinate ongoing development. Moshe is Drupal.org user number 23 and submitted his first patch to the Drupal project in October 2001, about nine months after it had been open sourced. He's taken his Drupal activities from a hobby, to a "nights and weekends" secondary income, to a full time occupation since 2007. Moshe joined Acquia in 2011. This interview was recorded in 2012. Moshe's contributions to Drupal "I had heard about open source, I had read about it in a magazine," explains Moshe, "and thought it was pretty neat. I looked at the Drupal files, got bold, and decided to change a string in there (a string of visible text), saved it, and reloaded the page. I had changed Drupal at that point! That was pretty exciting." He obviously got a taste for changing and improving Drupal if you look at a selection of the massive number of contributions he's made to the project over the years: Maintainer of the Drush project, the excellent command line interface for Drupal developers. Maintainer of the Devel Module, another useful Drupal developer tool. Moshe created the original Organic Groups Module (for a children's pony show club website for Finnish National Television ... I'm not making this up.) He started the Groups.Drupal.org website, Drupal's community- and special-interest group-hub. While running Cyrve, a Drupal data-migration company, he was part of developing and open sourcing the Migrate Module, which helps anyone move content from other systems into Drupal. moshe_final.mp3

Erik Webb – aka "Southern Gentleman" within his team – Senior Technical Consultant with Acquia's Professional Services group helps some of the "biggest Drupal users" in his job. In any given week, he might be doing anything from training people brand new to Drupal, to performance tuning and everything in between to make projects succeed. "I helped a Fortune 100 company move their entire web presence to Drupal." At this scale, Erik's job is about how to take Drupal to that next level and making it something that works for millions of people," day in and day out. "The Drupal community is really about trying to make an experience and make something that people want to come back to." Deep roots in open source Erik is a long term user of GNU Linux, with a sysadmin background, he's also Red Hat certified. Though he didn't know it when he set out on his road to Drupal, it was a series of logical steps that got him where he is today. "Being a good systems administrator, you know how to program, you know what languages look like, so you pick up PHP. Once you pick up PHP, you write some really ugly applications and you realise other people are doing this, too, so you pick up frameworks. I worked with Symfony and Code Igniter. Then you say, 'well a framework's great, but there's still so much I have to do," and you eventually reach Drupal. Now you can focus on the cool part of the website and you can let all the really basic stuff that you'd have to do all the time, you let Drupal take care of that for you so you can enjoy your job more. Contributing to Drupal Since Erik finds himself in many different parts of the United States in the curse of his job, he uses any opportunity to go to local Drupal user groups, meet ups, and events like Drupal Camps: LA, Georgia, Boston, North Carolina and more. "That's what sets the Drupal community apart. You can be out there and sharing source code – and that's fantastic – but at a certain point it's really great to see people, talk to them about what they're doing with Drupal. I don't think there's any better feeling than seeing someone at a Drupal Camp as a new Drupalist and then a year and a half later you see them again and they say, 'Hey, I've been working on this really cool project!' To see all that grow, that's what makes community to me. Not the size or the content, but how we bring people into it and how we mature those people. "One of the things I love most about the travel in my job is that I get to see so many different people. Being able to connect them, creating a sort of mesh-network, I can bring all these people together. Once they're sharing, then they know someone else, and they can share experiences. I fee like being at Acquia and having the luxury to travel and see all these cities and people, we're in a unique position to be at the center of this kind of matchmaking. This interview was recorded in 2012. erik_webb_final.mp3

Andrew Melck, Solutions Architect on the Pre-Sales Team in Acquia Europe is the subject of the first Acquia podcast of 2013. Andrew came to Acquia and Drupal from a German digital agency where he had experience with both open source and proprietary technologies. He was excited to encounter Drupal as a PHP project with global scope and for the fact that, "When I downloaded it the first time, it just ran. I grasped how this thing worked and how you could plug stuff together very quickly. It seemed very straightforward." Compared to Typo3's "dispiriting" back end, "I found it really interesting how you could even mod the Drupal back end for specific roles and specific purposes." Regarding content reuse, Drupal's content-first model of site architecture was a positive change for him after dealing with the consequences of incorrectly architected Sharepoint or Typo3 sites – which a use hierarchy-first model – where users end up not being able to share content between multiple parts of a site. What is a Solutions Architect at Acquia? Andrew says, "Solutions architects support the Sales team on large projects. We help assess whether Drupal is a good fit and then work with the Sales rep to scope out how Acquia can make a meaningful offering and maybe bring in partners to complete the deal." "If we can move through the initial RFI (Request for Information) phase, where there will often be a large number of vendors invited, we'll get to an 'RFP' (Request for Proposals) phase with fewer vendors. My colleagues and I will then help write documentation the explains what we can do technically and commercially for the proposed project. If we get into the final phase, we'll prepare demos, build sites and proofs of concept to demonstrate what Drupal can do. We've got experience with a lot of clients and can also provide the back-stories [needed to help choose a Drupal solution]. An anecdote is often worth a lot more than 500 lines of code as a proof." Open source is about best of breed solutions A solutions architect needs to have a deep knowledge of parallel and competitive technologies, to be able to assess "what the business case is for making a change [i.e. switching to Drupal] or making some kind of modification to the overall setup. For example, if you've got a situation where Sharepoint is being used as a document management system, Drupal can be put on top of Sharepoint as the web interface, and you can surface your Sharepoint documents using CMIS - a standard integration that can be used with Sharepoint, or its open source alternative, Alfresco." "Alfreso.com – a Drupal site – is a good example of how you can do this. Alfresco have moved away from providing their own web platform; they now recommend using Drupal as their front end. This is another great example of the way that Drupal and open source is all about using a best of breed approach. In this case, the backend technology is Java, the front is end PHP, and we're using standard connectors to put those together." What's hot in the enterprise? Responsive design aka "mobile first" is huge. "The way Drupal 8 is going to be responsive out of the door for the back end as well. People are really interested. "Companies are interested in the whole Web Experience Management and Engagement Management (WEM) area. The way that different authors can work with a system, the way that you'll be able to edit content in place with true WYSIWYG; that kind of stuff is really important. That's one of the areas that people really care about." Drupal distributions - accelerators and conversation starters A distribution is a preconfigured instance of Drupal, ready for a particular use-case: eCommerce, schools, musician websites, conference management and so on. Acquia maintains a couple of Drupal distributions, including Drupal Commons is one such distribution. "Acquia likes to call Commons an accelerator. Commons is a great way of communicating what value Drupal can provide to a company and the way we

Chris Pliakas is a solutions architect at Acquia. He works closely with the Acquia sales representatives and potential clients "to help people who might not know about Drupal or might be considering a proprietary solution see how Drupal can help them. It's really great to be out on the front lines helping people to see Drupal the way we do." Chris is also a search and data management expert and and the Product Owner of Acquia Search. He makes the point that open data is only useful "if you can find it and make meaningful findings from that data. Search is a way to do that." Chris is especially focused on data-visualisations and the Facet API module that provides a common interface for the various faceted search technologies and implementations in Drupal: Apache Solr, Search API, and so on. On getting started with Drupal and open source Chris is a musician and came to technology through building PC systems for audio recording at university. The reasons he had for getting started with open source software ("Open source makes it easy to play with stuff; you don't have to buy it.") are another way of expressing one of the ways it also minimises risk in a business context: Failure, improvement, and innovation are cheaper with open source software. Chris started learning about the web when he needed a website. Learning PHP was followed by the discovery that "I could actually make a career out of that!" and he went on to become a certified MySQL developer and administrator, LPIC certified, and a certified PHP engineer-developer. On leveraging the power of community-built software He joined a company as a junior sys-admin and "they kinda forced me to use Drupal." It was love at first sight, "The first four months, I hated Drupal, with red-faced, keyboard-pounding, fist-clenching hatred." The change from hand-coding everything from scratch to learning to take advantage of Drupal came with an aha-moment: "A lot of problems have already been solved in Drupal and if I change my attitude, then I can leverage what really smart people are doing." Drupal gives you a head start, "I get to do all the interesting things that I'd never be able to do if I were doing it all myself." "Working with Drupal gave me a career doing something that I love and that I feel has the ability to change the world. Working on the technical pre-sales side of things, I have a lot of discussions with people who are adopting proprietary solutions. The mindset is totally different; all the data is locked in, it's tough to get to, it's tough to extrapolate. With an open platform, that data is able to be shared and propagated. That's really important. Drupal allows anybody to get that information out there so that people can make the best decisions possible." Chris_Pliakas.mp3

Michael Hofmockel is a technical consultant at Acquia, based in Ames Iowa. Like many Drupalists, Michael's background wasn't in computer science, but led him to Drupal nonetheless. As he puts it, "Drupal's great because you can come at it from almost any angle ... and we do!" Michael was building databases as a soil chemist at Duke University. When he needed a web interface for a database, "I decided not to build it for myself, tried Drupal and I never needed anything else again!" Note: This podcast was recorded using Skype and the sound quality varies in places. The first Drupal Camp wedding? Michael helps run the Iowa Drupal user group, which recently wrapped up their 2nd successful "Drupal Corn" camp. Friends of mine got engaged during a DrupalCon London presentation, but as far as I know the Drupal Corn wedding was a first in the Drupal community. Drupal then and now The first Drupal version Michael used was 4.5 more than seven years ago – very old school! For those of you who might not remember, there was not only no CCK, there were no content types, not even flexi-node (bonus points if you still remember that!) ... "So if you needed a node type, you wrote it. There was good bit of user interface, but as far as customisation and new features went, you were writing everything yourself. Drupal 7 is a lot more stacking of modules and configuration and a lot less code" compared to older versions. "That's not to say you don't ever write code in Drupal 7, but you're a lot more surgical with your code." Getting up to speed with Drupal Drupal core can only do so much, as Michael points out. To make it really sing, you need to start adding contributed modules. Getting to know which of the thousands of them do what you need and how best to configure them is important. If you're new to Drupal, Michael's reviews of the "Using Drupal" books are a great place to start (as are the books themselves: they contain "recipes" to build common site types and functionalities): Using Drupal (Drupal 6) module tour: http://groups.drupal.org/node/18669 Using Drupal (Drupal 7) module tour: http://groups.drupal.org/node/224559 The reviews give you two nice, vetted lists of modules. Michael recently presented a session at Drupal Camp Chicago entitled "45 modules in 45 minutes." Grab the slides here, it's a strong list of what to go investigate, too. We'll be exploring those 45 modules and more in upcoming Acquia "Module Minute" podcasts, too! On working at Acquia "I have teammates who are really awesome and look out for me, and help me when I need help. I really enjoy being part of a team. I find the work really challenging and that's a great thing. Working at Acquia, I get to focus on the part of this work that I love and I can keep on learning more. Acquia has introduced me to a level of work that I never would have gotten to experience otherwise." Michael_Hofmockel_12_final.mp3

Sam Lerner is an Acquia Client Advisor with something of a specialty in search technologies; he is the co-maintainer of the Google Search Appliance and Apache Solr Drupal projects. His job is to use his own knowledge and take advantage of Acquia's "deep bench" in all things Drupal to help clients make their websites successful. He calls working at Acquia "fuel injected knowledge". On Drupal history Sam got his start in the last days of Drupal 4 and the earliest days of Drupal 5. He says there's been an evolution from being "a toolkit to code up stuff ... Drupal 5 sites of any complexity would often require thousands of lines of custom code. Today, with Drupal 7, anyone who can point and click can start building really powerful websites. On working at Acquia Being a Client Advisor at Acquia "is a very, very rewarding job. You get to look back over your day. Maybe it was super busy and you were almost going out of your mind, but then you look back at the end of the day and you say, 'Wow, I solved five very serious problems for people running very large organisations." It is very gratifying." Sam_Lerner_final.mp3