By Anthony Myers
Commercial Drupal services provider Acquia has debuted a tool called Site Factory, an apt name as it's meant to help marketers launch multiple websites in short order for building campaigns and launches.
Maintain the Content, Acquia Does the Rest
Site Factory sounds just like what the name implies, and when businesses or agencies need to create dozens or multiple dozens of websites, this sounds like at least a competitive option. With the Acquia Cloud Site Factory, template based, customizable sites can be set up by business users, and just a few administrators can manage hundreds of websites from one dashboard.
For marketers especially, this seems like a good fit. When a new campaign or launch gears up, content is readied for deployment at a moments notice. With a tool like Site Factory, that content can be spread out across the new properties, and marketers don't have to deal with maintenance of the sites, or any of the technical back end details.
The websites can be extended with Drupal extensions, and can be integrated with existing Web properties as well. The underlying technology is based on the Drupal Gardens initiative, a Drupal Saas environment that doesn't involve any downloading of software or setting up hosting and servers.
On the Factory Floor
The idea with Cloud Site Factory is to build sites fast or even simply clone existing sites with a click. The sites themselves feature non technical editing tools, advanced CSS tools, social login and sharing, and embedding of video or RSS feeds.
