Speed has become a necessity for enterprise projects. Developers need to roll out sites faster than ever before. But that’s not all. They also need to ensure that these sites are capable of supporting content-rich digital experiences, and easy for other stakeholders to work with.
While Drupal in itself makes all this possible, there is a significant learning curve involved in choosing the right mix of modules that will deliver what an enterprise needs. And that’s where Acquia Lightning comes in.
Acquia Lightning is an open source Drupal 8 distribution, that allows development teams to kickstart their Drupal 8 projects. It consists of a Drupal 8 core bundled together with a pre-selected set of modules, themes and libraries designed to create a strong foundation for enterprise grade digital experiences with Drupal. It takes the guesswork out of module selection, and leverages Acquia’s years of learning across projects to give enterprises exactly what they need.
While developers are the primary stakeholders working on the Drupal 8 projects, there are also teams of site builders, designers and content editors who will use the final Drupal implementation. Keeping that in mind, Acquia Lightning is designed so developers can create Drupal sites that empower people in these roles, and helps them do their job better.
For most enterprises, Acquia Lightning is seen to have brought a 30% savings in time spent of developing and configuring Drupal 8 projects. That’s because:
The Lightning distribution focuses on four key aspects of Drupal development to deliver gains for developers and experience creators:
The ability to create sites and pages with effective layouts, and easily add and edit content is a key requirement for editorial teams. More so given the need to offer rich content experiences on site, and do it in time to leverage key market opportunities. However, the high level of dependence on developers to be able to make changes to page layouts has been a critical bottleneck for editorial teams.
The layout capabilities of Acquia Lightning allow developers to step out of the equation, and let content authors and experience creators independently handle page building. A drag-and-drop layout designer, combined with page-building components and tools enable site builders and content authors to easily and quickly put together the kind of pages they want. And this is done without them having to dive into the code.
Media management has always been somewhat cumbersome with Drupal, with no out-of-the-box features available for it. The lack of an easy-to-search media library made it difficult for content editors to quickly pick and integrate desired media formats on the pages they build, hampering the user experience.
Lightning brings in a pre-selected and configured set of modules for media management. You get an easily searchable media library that holds different media formats in one place, and easily embed them on the pages of your choice with WYSIWYG integration. Teams can also perform bulk media uploads. And it provides support for external media sources, allowing you to import content from Youtube, Twitter and Instagram.
Given that enterprises have multiple authors and editors involved in the content creation process, a streamlined editing and publishing workflow is crucial.
With Lightning, developers can create completely customizable workflows that suit the specific needs of different content teams. They can start off with the basic workflow configurations available out-of-the-box in Lightning, and add customizations on top of it.
The Content Moderation module available with Lightning, in combination with Acquia’s Moderation Note module, allows content teams to use a shareable content piece and collaboratively work and make edits on it before publishing.
Most enterprises work with a diverse set of technologies and systems besides Drupal, and need all of these to be interoperable. Easy flow of data to and from the Drupal ecosystem is crucial for the complete enterprise architecture to work smoothly and build new applications atop it.
The API component for Acquia Lightning gives developers a pre-selected set of tools to quickly create APIs for their Drupal implementation. These include JSON APIs, UIs for browsing APIs and OPen APIs capabilities to make your APIs discoverable. This aspect of Lightning is being overwhelmingly used to create decoupled Drupal applications, exposing the Drupal backend to frontend frameworks like Angular and ReactJS via APIs.
Besides the four key features outlined here, Acquia Lightning also comes with the following capabilities out-of-the-box:
Given the pace of transformation in enterprises, is it imperative that they do not get stuck with a Drupal distribution that doesn’t scale with their needs. With that in mind, Acquia Lightning is designed to be future-ready.
Besides being maintained in close correlation with Drupal, Acquia Lightning is also a key piece in Drupal’s innovation cycles. Several new features for improving developer experience are first introduced and tested in Acquia Lightning before they become a part of the Drupal core.
Lightning is also ready to work with other solutions in the larger Acquia and Drupal ecosystem:
For enterprises looking to get the best of Drupal 8, and do it fast, Acquia Lightning is the distribution of choice. And Srijan teams bring together a perfect blend of expertise with Lightning and experience of working with several global enterprises, to help you leverage Lightning for your Drupal projects.
Let’s start the conversation on how we can help power your Drupal projects with Acquia Lightning.