Acquia Engage: Drupal 10, Commerce Factory, & Composability

We were excited to gather in person for Acquia Engage Miami, one of five stops Acquia has planned for its annual Engage conference along this year’s Digital Freedom Tour. The tour started in Miami, and it includes future stops in Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, and London. The latter two events will take place sometime in early 2023.

We learned a lot in Miami about Acquia’s product strategy, the state of digital marketing, and what Acquia has on their product roadmaps. In the last five years, Acquia has worked hard to offer composable services for Drupal and those services were on full display at Acquia Engage. Personalization? Email marketing? Digital asset management? Commerce needs? Check, check, check, check. Acquia has it all for marketers!

There were many other exciting announcements at Acquia Engage Miami. Here are some of our key takeaways from the event.

Acquia’s Customer Experience is Composable

The Acquia ecosystem has grown to include a myriad of plug-and-play products to extend Drupal so it meets the needs of online businesses. From digital asset management (DAM) to marketing campaign management, content personalization, customer data platforms (CDPs), and much more—Acquia provides you with the best-of-breed technology.

Acquia’s offerings are designed to be turnkey solutions that reduce your time and effort toward getting online with other products. You’re free to bring your own solutions and software providers of course, and you can mix and match to them suit your needs.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or just need one or two solutions to bridge the gap for your digital experience, Acquia is the only provider in the Drupal space that gives you the freedom to compose your future.

Drupal 10 is Coming

Drupal 10 was a very popular topic at Engage Miami. Slated for release this December, Drupal 10 will provide new features and improvements from Drupal 9. These updates will bring it up to date with the latest version of Symfony and make it compatible with PHP 8.2, which will unlock all kinds of new features for developers to use when they’re creating solutions and integrations in Drupal.

Folks were very curious about the details, features, and upgrade procedure(s). We had several in-depth talks about the new version of Drupal, and since we’re experts in Drupal migrations and upgrades going as far back as Drupal 5, we believe that updating to Drupal 10 will be the smoothest process yet.

We’ve been hard at work aligning projects so they’re ready to upgrade when the time comes and have even released a handful of modules compatible with Drupal 10, so they are ready to use! Here are a few that we’ve written about already:

• Better Drupal 10 Error Pages with Ignition
• Modules for Ambitious Site Builders: Views Minimum Condition

We have more in the pipeline about Drupal 10 so stay tuned!

Acquia Commerce Factory

Acquia unveiled a new product at the conference in partnership with commercetools dubbed “Acquia Commerce Factory”. Like Acquia Site Factory, the goal of Commerce Factory is to make it dead simple to spin up new sites powered by commercetools and Drupal to get your commerce experience online in less than 90 days.

If you’ve ever approached setting up commerce online, you know how daunting it can be to get all the details right. Leveraging this new tool will ensure that most of the average tasks and commerce configurations are taken care of out of the box, so you can focus on your customers and experience while getting to market faster than you can if make your own commerce solutions. Of course, it can be integrated with other Acquia products too, like Acquia DAM, Acquia CDP, and Acquia Personalization to aid in rounding out the full commerce experience.

Scaling with Drupal and Acquia Roundtable

Velir hosted a roundtable discussion around scaling your Drupal experience with Acquia. We had several valuable conversations about the success and challenges of using Acquia Site Studio, Acquia DAM, and Acquia Site Factory with Drupal 9 to meet the needs of today’s customers and users. We also traded valuable knowledge and techniques from our own experiences this year working on several high-profile Drupal 9 launches.

The truth is, even with all the technology at our fingertips, scaling and crafting your online experience can be challenging even for the most technically-minded individuals. On the upside, technology will keep evolving to meet those challenges. We’ve also been working to deeply familiarize ourselves with Acquia’s tech stack and earn certifications that provide us the expertise we need to help your organization meet its digital goals.

Armed with this knowledge we’ve conquered technical challenges like building custom React components for Acquia Site Studio, deploying changes for dozens of sites simultaneously with Acquia Site Factory, integrating years of uploaded assets with Acquia DAM into Drupal, and meeting the accessibility needs of users and industries with stringent requirements.

Compose Your Digital Future Today

We’re excited about what Acquia has in store for the future. We love that their suite of products is a myriad of plug-and-play options that extend Drupal so you can compose your own digital future. Looking ahead to the next few months, we’re eager to get our hands on Drupal 10 and to try our Acquia Commerce Factory.

Want to know more about how you can upgrade to Drupal 10 or how Acquia can help you make the most of Drupal with useful products like Commerce Factory? Contact us.

As an Acquia Gold Partner with an Acquia Certified Drupal Cloud Practice and a Triple Certified Drupal Expert, we’re happy to help you.