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Acquia’s Drupal dev cloud offering

As a long-standing "front-end developer" (ie HTML, CSS, JavaScript. ie I build websites), I have sampled many and varied web development environments, from the infuriatingly inflexible Visual Studio with CVS to an eminently elegant virtual environment with Subversion.
Written by Jake Rayson Rayson, Contributor

As a long-standing "front-end developer" (ie HTML, CSS, JavaScript. ie I build websites), I have sampled many and varied web development environments, from the infuriatingly inflexible Visual Studio with CVS to an eminently elegant virtual environment with Subversion.

But being a lowly front-ender, the whys & wherefors of the dev server setups thankfully eluded me.

So I was intrigued by Acquia’s Drupal dev cloud offering. Acquia (pronounced like Ikea but with an "Ah-") are the corporate off-shoot of the resplendently robust Drupal web publishing platform, in the same way that Automattic provide hosting services for WordPress.

The idea behind DevCloud (good name btw, short, punchy, to-the-point) is quite simply a point ‘n’ click web development environment for Drupal, with dev, staging and production servers.

Now, dev environments are nothing new. What is new is that mere front-enders & other mortals can now easily manage their very own Drupal web sites. Not so important when there’s only one of you but as soon as there’s multiple developers/stakeholderers, you’d better engage in some sort of revision control.

If you already have a dedicated web dev team and environment, then this probably won’t be for you but if you are small startup or have your web eggs in more than one publishing platform basket, then it’s worth a look.

PS thank you to Bryan House and team for the complimentary webinar, very engaging and polished.

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