
Acquia Lightning is an open-source Drupal 8 distribution that was designed to enhance, fasten and simplify the process of creating powerful (and responsive!) digital experiences.
Drupal 8 gives developers and content authors full flexibility to shape their websites and applications that meets their vision. It is packed with thousands of powerful features that requires to be able to support a wide variety of content-rich applications. Drupal Lightning by Acquia is a lean, ready-to-use starter-kit that encompasses just the tools needed to develop and manage your enterprise-grade digital experiences. Drupal 8 Lightning is built specifically to empower your marketing and editorial teams to build better, easier and faster. Here are 5 reasons why choosing Acquia Lightning could be a great decision for your organization’s editorial and content teams.
1. Speed of Drupal Lightning
This aggressively competitive era calls for quick formulas that can produce epic digital experiences. Drupal 8 Lightning distribution enables organizations to develop new applications in Drupal 8 faster. According to Chris Stone, former Chief Product Officer at Acquia, “Drupal Lightning removes 20 percent of the time required for every new Drupal 8 development project.” With Acquia Lightning, Drupal developers can now empower business and non-technology savvy users with powerful tools to enable them build on their websites faster.
2. Drag This and Drop That
Drupal Lightning distribution enables you to easily design and customize new website layouts yourself without a Drupal developer’s assistance. Content editors won’t need to use any code to design a layout. With the help of Panels, Drupal Lightning layouts lets you easily drag and drop content blocks (elements wherever you like! This powerful feature lets you create compelling User Experiences as you can visually design the layout of your website the way you want to. With just a few clicks (and zero code), you can – add rich text, media, content references, slideshows, Google Maps and just about everything you need to create an interactive and engaging website. Not just this, your Drupal developers can also create custom components which you can then use from your library.
3. Effortless Workflows
Having everything together, without rummaging through the place, makes life simpler and easier – don’t you think? Editorial workflows call for tons of significant activities like creating, editing, reviewing and publishing content. Acquia Lightning’s easy all-in-one-place workflow management system, lets you easily tackle the chaos. It provides you with an approval dashboard meant just for your editorial workflow. Here you can easily check the status of the content you are reviewing - change, delete or publish it at your convenience. The version tracker allows you to check for changes and updates between different revisions, giving you the freedom to revise, compare and revert your content. You can review them, pick the most appropriate version, schedule and publish the content, all in the dashboard.
4. Manage your Media
You cannot have an engaging website without leveraging the power of Media. Drupal 8 Lightning distribution offers an easy and effective approach to add, embed and manage your media like Videos, Audio files, Images, Social Media Widgets, Documents, Maps and DAM (Digital Asset Management). All added Media will be stored in a Media library, giving you easy and quick access to all your media. Using the CKEditor (rich text editor), you can attach or embed any media into any content type. Cropping and resizing your images is easy as pie.
With Drupal Lightning by Acquia, designing interactive digital experiences is simply effortless.
5. Sneak Peek – Experience Preview
You’ve got to think like your customer if you want to sell better. And to provide great digital experiences, you should be able to see exactly what your customer is seeing. Acquia Lightning for Drupal 8 (upgrade now!) enables you to conduct a comprehensive preview at every stage so you view what you publish before it goes live.
Right out-of-the-box, Acquia Lightning is a slick, lightweight, all-you-need Drupal 8 solution that will meet all your web initiatives’ demands. It is one of the best ways to jump-start your Drupal projects and can accelerate your time to market. Headless Lightning lets you create beautiful and effective decoupled web applications with ease. Security is almost synonymous with Drupal CMS and Acquia lightning conforms to security best practices. Lightning undergoes regular security audits and releases frequent patches to keep your website’s health in check. Acquia Lightning makes development on Drupal simpler, faster and more powerful.