#drupal book

The very things that Drupal thrives on is being an open-sourced CMS and having a generous community of highly-skilled web developers who are always ready and willing jump in when help is needed.

Suffice to say, it's not the CMS that sets Drupal apart, but the people who make up the community.

How We Wrote the Best-Selling Drupal Book

We've been fortunate over the last couple of years to have great success with our CMS books.

Drupal 7 Explained launched in May and over the last few months it has become the best-selling Drupal book. 

That book was the follow-up to Joomla! Explained which has been the best-selling Joomla book for over 2 years now.

Read about 'Workflow' here.

Drupal and the Digital Agency - Give to Receive

Richard is the author of Getting Started with Drupal Commerce, a great resource for learning about Drupal Commerce, the powerful open source eCommerce toolkit. As he and Myles discuss in this interview, they believe deeply in doing business the open source way. Being experts in what they call "a niche within a niche" and sharing that knowledge and code–a possibility unique to open-source-based businesses–has helped build iKOS's reputation as a service provider and brought them more business as a result.

Richard explains that "giving all of our code away", eventually starts to pay off. Now other UK digital agencies come to iKOS, based on the integration work that iKOS has done with payment provider SagePay, for example. "That collaboration with other agencies, it's really interesting to me that they are our competitors, but [the journey has been] getting to the mindset that we're all working toward the same goal and that there's enough of a big pie out there. Giving back to the community has paid us back tenfold."

I put it to Myles that investing in code that is open for all to see and use helped iKOS's reputation and brought them more clients. He agrees, "Absolutely," but there seems to be more to it: "Honestly, that was kind of a byproduct. We were doing everything aligned with our business goals. Agencies always find it hard; we're chasing client work. But we started changing. If we were going to do this, we were going to do this right. We felt we had a coding standard and so many little byproducts have come out of this. We've had an incredible staff benefit." So one benefit came from exposing junior developers to the benefits of releasing early and learning from thousands of their peers in the drupal community. "Early on we'd have taken that. That would have been reason alone for us to keep contributing."

Read more on Richard Jones here.

Next steps for how Acquia plans to give back to Drupal 8

People wonder what we do at Acquia's Office of the CTO (OCTO). In order to provide some more transparency, I wanted to share how we plan to give back between today and the end of the year.

Drupal 8 beta 1

Now that we're forgoing an upgrade path for a migration path, we need to redefine the release criteria for 'beta 1'. We also need to track the issues that block beta in order to help escalate the most critical of the critical issues. We will work with the Drupal 8 core maintainers to define and communicate these criteria, and help with timely patch reviews and issue management for beta-blocking issues.

More on 'how Acquia will give back to Drupal 8' here.

Easy to Use, Flexible CMS

Drupal is a popular CMS framework which gives you the power to easily add or edit pages and content on your website yourself.

Our development team has experience with large and small Drupal projects, and can create custom themes and modules as needed.

Our team of experienced Drupal developers can help you with your next project, whatever the size, by providing a total start-to-finish service, updating your existing Drupal site, providing support or providing 'top up' development when your team needs extra help.

Need web developers who can build your website on Drupal? Go here.

If you're thinking of putting up a Drupal website and have no skills for it, it's best to find someone else who can. If you, however, are interested to learn it, jump in on the workshops and conferences Drupal communities have scheduled in your area and get right into it.