layout: post title: "Site upgrade: Acquia Drupal 6" created: 1229383734 categories:

• Acquia
• Food Like That
• Seven Hills Bed and Breakfast
• BMC

As of yesterday evening, this site is now running Drupal 6 on a single Acquia codebase that also runs Seven Hills B&B (my parents' bed and breakfast site -- upgraded all the way from Drupal 4.6!) and Food Like That (my food / recipe site)

I continue to recommend Acquia for sites large and small. For smaller sites, if you've got some extra time around the holidays, the "Community" level of Acquia Network support is free until December 31st of this year. And once you sign up, you have that access for a full year. I have subscriptions for all the sites above that I've mentioned. You might have some non profit or smaller business sites that you help out with that would be a good fit.

For larger sites, you may be customizing too much to take advantage of Acquia. But, for startups just building out their Drupal implementation, having the consulting team and "backup support" of Acquia makes the Standard or Pro levels definitely worthwhile.

Anyway, end of the Acquia commercial :P I'm a fan of what those guys have done so far, but still would like to see a better install profile. This should directly lead to needing less of a Drupal developer to get somewhere fast. I used to joke about Cisco, which often gives out free / cheap hardware to non profits, that the equipment was worthless unless it had a Cisco Certified Engineer strapped to the top of it...

So, BMC is upgraded. A few highlights:

• forums are nuked -- they hadn't been used in ages and there was limited valuable content in there
• new theme -- marinelli - the header has rotating photos that are some of my personal favourite images that I've taken over the years. Watch for giant bacon! I'd like to see this built into a theme with imagecache one of these days. It's just manually selected and cropped images with a simple PHP rotator script.
• twitter integration -- see my profile for the tweets from my personal account
• gravatar support -- when you comment, you'll have the picture associated with your email address displayed next to your comment
• comment notify -- this is newly part of Acquia; simple email notification of follow ups on comments if you want to stay on top of something
• ratings -- I don't know what I'm going to do this yet. I turned on user rating of articles. The vast majority of my traffic is "anonymous" -- searchers on Google ending up on this site. Maybe some of them will click a rating widget? We'll see. If you leave a comment or manually visit the site (as opposed to visiting through RSS), please do "rate" any of the posts that you feel are good.

There is very likely stuff that's not working here and there. There are lots of things I'd still like to work on, like actually customizing the theme to give it some of my own personality.

Big on my list is some sort of Google Reader integration, as my shared items is where I'm generating most of my daily content these days.

Comments and feedback welcome