Last spring, Acquia rolled out its new Acquia Certified program, to give those hiring Drupal developers a standardized tool for measuring an engineer’s skill level. We’re thrilled to announce that 3 members of our team have passed the test and become official Acquia Certified engineers.

We’ve been spending some time with the recently-released Drupal 8 Beta, and have good news to report: Drupal 8 media handling tools don’t suck!

With DrupalCon Amsterdam coming up later this month, the Drupal Association continues its successful streak of gathering the global tribe in some of the hippest cities on Earth. And DrupalSquad will be there in force (see our updated DrupalSquad profile on D.O). We won’t have a booth this time. But several members of our crew will be there keeping our fingers on the pulse of the Drupal community and spreading the word about our maintenance, support, and development services. 

If it's been over a year since you built or relaunched your website, you are considering a new hosting provider, or you just inherited your site from another team, then you should strongly consider a professional site audit.

A professional site audit uses a baseline of industry standard tools and rules to get under the hood, inventory what's running on your site and discover the weak areas that need improvement.

A pretty well known issue with Drupal-based products development/support is that if there are more than one developer working on the project, you have to keep an extra eye on how new features or bug-fixes are being deployed across environments – be it DEV instances, or DEV to TEST/PROD deployment.

Code-only based solutions are out of scope here – source code control software like SVN, Git, Mercurial (for those of you who are geeks) are available and considered a standard tool to manage changes in your code. However, if you choose a development path that involves stuff being configured through Drupal's admin UI (which is not bad at all – I know people who can build a site of any complexity using Views/Rules/Panels) – managing those changes can easily become a nightmare. That means you have to control code AND db changes (yeah, tons of checkboxes you are used to clicking on while configuring the site go directly to the database in most cases).

Last week nearly the entire US side of the DrupalSquad crew converged at DrupalCon Portland. This semi-annual gathering of the Drupal community drew an estimated 3,500 people from around the globe. DrupalSquad was there this time as a Silver Sponsor, showing off our newly relaunched ticketing system for handling customers' Drupal maintenance and support needs. And we loved the opportunity to catch some face time with many of our customers and partners – whether it was at our booth, chatting about caching tables, distros and APIs, or relaxing after hours over local food and brews at one of the plethora of parties that took place all over Portland.

Lack of capacity is probably the most persistent problem facing software and web development shops attempting to scale. Each project launched creates a wave of small enhancements, updates, and maintenance tasks that can overwhelm growing firms.  Often, top talent has moved on to other projects leaving the customer in the lurch and the firm scrambling to get a low-revenue yet essential task completed.

We have been privileged to have had the opportunity to experience and contribute to Drupal's explosive growth over the past eight years. The platform, more than 600,000 developers, and the diverse vendor ecosystem surrounding it, are driving costs down and capabilities up for industry after industry.