Acquia Provides Support to Bring College Mogul on Drupal Back Up

Drupal has won Best Overall Open Source CMS Award for the second year in a row as well as Best PHP Open Source CMS by Packt Publishing. After working at Acquia for the past few months and learning about the Drupal phenonemon, it comes as no surprise. I only wish I knew about Drupal earlier so I wouldn't have wasted time toying with WordPress. WP is a nice platform, and you can build great blogs on the software, but Drupal is able to take content management to the next level. Drupal gives you the ability to build a social network on top of your blog, add group functionality, profiles, blog networks, or build sophisticated social publishing sites.

Although, open source Drupal has tremendous benefits, there has been no central source for expertise, technical support, and network services to help you manage your website. Acquia bridges the gap between proprietary and open source models. Of course, you can scan your valuable time searching the web for your answers, but why do that when you have some of the world's top Drupal expertise at your finger tips?

My colleague, Kevin Hankens (who previously migrated VeloNews) at Acquia, helped me get College Mogul (built on Drupal) back up and running this week within an hour. If you run a website, you probably know how frustrating it is when something goes wrong and you can't fix it yourself. It can cost you money too. But, what was wrong with my Drupal site?

1. The site was down with an error message that just told me to check the settings.php file in my directory. Well, that's great...but what does that mean? I questioned whether it was my hosting provider or an actual problem with Drupal.

2. Cron wouldn't run. This is important for Drupal becuase it acts as a "clean up" service that helps your site run more efficiently. But, I was also concerned because my site's map wasn't being uploaded to search engines, which likely effected my SEO.

3. I couldn't enable or disable modules because that list and admin section simply wouldn't show up. In other words, I couldn't add new functionality to my site.

I was frustrated..very, very frustrated. Thankfully, Acquia and Kevin Hankens were able to help me. By asking the right questions and investigating various different areas of the system, Kevin figured out that the MySQL database had to be restarted, memory had to be increased, and that College Mogul needed some Drupal technical tweaks. College Mogul is now back up and running and I'm back to blogging.

A lot times, I find myself explaining that Acquia doesn't just provide technical support. We also provide advisory support that can be incredibly valuable not only for production sites, but for projects in the development phase. We can help you:

1. Select the best modules to use
2. Advise on the "Drupal" way of building custom modules
3. Security best practices
4. Performance tuning
5. Architecture review
6. Search Engine Optimization

Give me a call at work (978-289-4267) or email and we can figure out the best way to help you improve your Drupal experience, deploy your new Drupal website, support your production site, or transform your website to take advantage of the powerful open source CMS.