Shockingly Fast Site
Development with
Acquia Lightning 4.0
Matthew Grasmick, Drupal Product Leader @ Acquia
David Aponovich, Product Marketer @ Acquia
May 22, 2019

2
Today’s Speakers
David Aponovich
Senior Product Mktg Director,
Acquia
Matthew Grasmick
Sr. Manager of Product
Management, Acquia

3
Agenda
○ Acquia Intro
○ The Challenge
○ Lightning Overview
○ Lightning 4.0!
○ Demo
○ Questions & answers

94%
Customer
Satisfaction
Rating
Leveraging
Drupal,
the Largest
Open Source
Community
3,500+
customers,
including
1,800
enterprises
30+
Fortune 100
customers
800+
Employees
Global
Partner
Program
GDPR
Ready
We provide the world’s most ambitious brands with technology that allows
them to embrace innovation and create customer moments that matter. At
Acquia, we believe in the power of community — giving our customers the
freedom to build tomorrow on their terms.
THE OPEN SOURCE DIGITAL
EXPERIENCE COMPANY
WHO WE ARE

WHY COMPANIES
CHOOSE ACQUIA
– Open Source and Cloud-native
– Freedom to own your digital roadmap
– Innovation, agility, and speed-to-market
– Flexible deployment architecture
– Cost efficient

N Y C
C H I C A G O
H Q B O S T O N
D C A U S T I N P O R T L A N D
B R I S B A N E G H E N T M U N I C H D E L H I
P A R I S R E A D I N G S Y D N E Y T O R O N T O
S F

7

Customers
Media & Entertainment Public Sector Higher Education CPG / Retail

8

Customers
Technology Life Sciences Financial Services Others

9
The Challenge
Building new sites and applications
requires greater speed

10

Pressure is on developers and site builders
- Organizations are rushing to operate better in
service of the customer
- Developers must be able to build, launch
& iterate rapidly
- Brands want great, content-rich experiences
across every channel
- Marketing & content teams must be
empowered to create & manage content
- Building and deploying content & experiences
in the cloud is a mandate
“Application development and delivery
leaders feel pressure from both
customers and competitors to
accelerate the pace of software
innovation.”
-Forrester Research

11

New demands for content teams, too
Marketers and content teams need
enterprise authoring capabilities to create
compelling content for digital experiences
Requirements include:
- Easy to use creation and editing
tools
- Workflow tools for process &
collaboration
- Publishing tools to get content to
market quickly & efficiently

12

Thousands of organizations building with Drupal 8
- Drupal 8 is a powerful solution for
building web sites and digital
experiences
- Adoption by brands, enterprises,
government, non-profit and other
organizations is driven by Drupal 8
and its feature-rich module
ecosystem

Building a Drupal site
requires a lot of up-front work

14

You don’t start with a polished site.

15

You start with a framework.
… to build a site

16

Module ecosystem is rich yet tough to navigate
Selecting the right Drupal modules when
building your application requires time, effort,
and complex analysis.
– 2,100+ contributed projects extend
Drupal 8’s capabilities
– Features & functionality
– Integrations
– Themes and UX improvements
– Nearly 6,000 projects under
development

17

Distributions enable developers to move quickly
Distributions package up Drupal core plus
additional projects such as themes, modules, and
libraries. Many distributions exist:
– Some distributions are full featured solutions
to specific use cases:
– Commerce
– Government
– Education
– Some are starting points for developers and
site builders

©2018 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
Lightning
LAYOUT MEDIA WORKFLOW APIs
For building enterprise authoring experiences

19

Why Acquia created the Lightning distribution
Based on our work with partners, customers, and
the Drupal community, we knew we needed to
provide a strong starting point for D8 projects:
– Address capabilities not yet present in
Drupal core
– Accelerate developer and site builder
experiences
– Support modern developer workflows

20
Example Scenario
Let’s say ... want to build a site with the following basic
features:
1. Media
2. Layout
3. Workflow
4. APIs
Nearly every site needs 1-3.

21
Where do you start?
1. Research options (modules, libraries, etc.)
2. Download and install contrib modules.
3. Configure modules.
4. Create “glue code” to make them play nicely.
5. Write tests

22

Drupal
Layout Workflow Media APIs
0% 100% site
complete
Feature x Feature y ...
Site Building & Development

Lightning accelerates
this process

24

Drupal
Layout Workflow Media APIs
0% 100% site
complete
Feature x Feature y ...
Site Building & Development
Site Building & DevelopmentDrupal Lightning

Wait, doesn’t Drupal
core do those things?

MEDIA
– Support media types:
○ Audio files
○ Tweets
○ Instagram posts
○ Videos
○ Images
– Drag-and-drop bulk
image uploads
– Image cropping
– Slideshows and
carousels
– Media Library
– Embeddable w/
WYSIWYG
LAYOUT
– Drag-and-drop interface
– Per content type and
per node layouts
– 8 default layouts
out-of-the-box
– Layout Discovery
support
WORKFLOW
– Default workflow states
– Workflow scheduling
– Moderation Sidebar
– Moderation Dashboard
APIs
– JSON API
– Open API Docs
– OAuth
– Open SSL support
Lightning 3 does more than core 8.6.

Some of this is in
Drupal 8.7

MEDIA
– Support media types:
○ Audio files
○ Tweets
○ Instagram posts
○ Videos
○ Images
– Drag-and-drop bulk
image uploads
– Image cropping
– Slideshows and
carousels
– Media Library
– Embeddable w/
WYSIWYG
LAYOUT
– Drag-and-drop interface
– Per content type and
per node layouts
– Layout Discovery
support
– 8 default layouts
out-of-the-box
WORKFLOW
– Default workflow states
– Workflow scheduling
– Moderation Sidebar
– Moderation Dashboard
APIs
– JSON API
– Open API Docs
– OAuth
– Open SSL support
Lightning 3 does more than core 8.7

Lightning delivers the
best of Drupal, early.

Lightning 4.x
w/ Drupal 8.7.x
available now!

MEDIA
– Support media types:
○ Audio files
○ Tweets
○ Instagram posts
○ Videos
○ Images
– Drag-and-drop bulk
image uploads
– Image cropping
– Slideshows and
carousels
– Media Library
– Embeddable w/
WYSIWYG
LAYOUT
– Drag-and-drop interface
– Per content type and
per node layouts
– Layout Discovery
support
– 8 default layouts
out-of-the-box
WORKFLOW
– Default workflow states
– Workflow scheduling
– Moderation Sidebar
– Moderation Dashboard
APIs
– JSON API
– Open API Docs
– OAuth
– Open SSL support
Lightning 4 does more than core 8.7

MEDIA
– Support media types:
○ Audio files
○ Tweets
○ Instagram posts
○ Videos
○ Images
– Drag-and-drop bulk
image uploads
– Image cropping
– Slideshows and
carousels
– Embeddable w/
WYSIWYG
LAYOUT WORKFLOW
– Default workflow states
– Workflow scheduling
– Moderation Sidebar
– Moderation Dashboard
APIs
– Open API Docs
– OAuth
– Open SSL support
Lightning 4 does more than core 8.7

MEDIA
– Support media types:
○ Audio files
○ Tweets
○ Instagram posts
○ Videos
○ Images
– Drag-and-drop bulk
image uploads
– Image cropping
– Slideshows and
carousels
– Embeddable w/
WYSIWYG
LAYOUT
– Layout Builder replaces
Panels
– Default LB components:
○ Google Map
○ Slideshow
○ Media
○ Banner
○ Text
– Default content types
and layouts (basic page)
WORKFLOW
– Default workflow states
– Workflow scheduling
– Moderation Sidebar
– Moderation Dashboard
– Revisions, and Landing
Pages just work
APIs
– Open API Docs
– OAuth
– Open SSL support
Lightning 4 does more than core 8.7
Admin UI
– New Claro theme!

Seeing is believing

35


Preview of Admin UI

Try it now!

40 ©2018 Acquia Inc. — Confidential and Proprietary
https://lightning.acquia.com/

41

$ composer create-project
acquia/lightning-project MY_PROJECT
$ cd MY_PROJECT && composer quick-start
http://bit.ly/getlightning

June 4th, 2019
2:00 - 5:30 pm
San Francisco Marriott Union Square
acquia.com/events/experience-acquia

Questions?

44
Seed Questions
● Do I need to be on Acquia Cloud to use Lighting
4?
● Is there a migrate path from Lightning 3 to
Lightning 4?
● What’s coming up in Lightning’s roadmap?
● How much faster will development be with
Lightning?