Commercial open source company Acquia has released Acquia Drupal, the first commercial open source distribution of the Drupal open source social publishing system, and the Acquia Network.

Dries Buytaert created the Drupal open source project in 2001 and co-founded Acquia with Jay Batson to aid companies that want to use Drupal but require enterprise-level support and functionality.

Acquia's Drupal offering packages some of the best software from the Drupal project and provides an advanced starting point for users to begin building social publishing websites, according to Bryan House, director of product marketing at Acquia.

"Acquia Drupal enables organizations to build sophisticated websites without extensive programming by taking advantage of reusable components to create new content types and information views," House notes. "This, combined with Acquia Drupal's user management features, allows site owners to increase social participation on a site with multi-user blogging, community forums, social networks, ratings, content syndication and aggregation, and more."

The Acquia Network works as an operations portal to manage Acquia Drupal sites and connect to Acquia support channels. "The Acquia Network completes the Drupal experience by providing the essential support and remote network services to efficiently operate sites with Acquia Drupal sites," House explains. Subscribers to the Acquia Network gain access to its subscriber forums, remote network services, and Acquia Drupal documentation.

Adobe is using Acquia Drupal to manage its Flex.org developer community, and JackBe is running its Mashup Developer Community on Acquia Drupal.

The product competes with Joomla, Movable Type, Vignette, Interwoven, and Fatwire in the content management arena.

Acquia Drupal is available as a free download. Annual subscriptions to the Acquia Network are available on a per-site basis in single-server, small cluster, and large cluster configurations. The annual single-server community-level subscription, normally priced at $200, is available free of charge through Dec. 31, 2008.

For more information, go to: acquia.com