Acquia DAM: Improving the Developer Experience

As an Acquia certified practice we’ve worked on many implementations with both Drupal and Marketing Cloud products. The announcement around Acquia teaming up with Widen and bridging that gap between Drupal and Marketing to fill in the missing piece of your DXP is promising and timely. As Phase2 is looking into our own DAM evolution, we are also keeping our clients’s DAM needs top of mind.

Now referred to as Acquia DAM, the Drupal integration simplifies how your content is organized and delivered across all digital experiences. It tackles many of the issues we’ve seen clients facing again and again; redundancy, brand consistency, workflow and content organization. 

“Content is at the heart of any standout digital experience,” said Dries Buytaert, Co-Founder and CTO of Acquia. “With a variety of asset types stored across disparate systems, many content authors struggle to maintain brand consistency as they build digital properties and create campaigns. The new Acquia DAM integration with Drupal makes it easier and faster to leverage brand-approved content, so content authors can focus on launching content rather than hunting down digital assets.” 

With DAMs being a central part of modern martech ecosystems, integrating them with your DXP offers a new, smarter solution for your organization. 

The integration takes full advantage of Drupal’s adaptability across multiple roles. Content authors can directly access Acquia DAM by choosing from multiple options and styles. Site builders are able to maintain control while preserving the existing workflow and permissions already in place. And administrators can monitor any asset use across the entirety of the digital experience. 

I reached out to one of our software architects, Caroline Casals, to get a developer’s perspective. Read on for her perspective on derivatives, serving assets and the developer experience; TL;DR use the new acquia_dam module!

Derivatives: No More Editing the Same Photo Multiple Times

Ultimately as a developer working with image assets, there are a few things we care about. The first is the ability to easily access and generate correctly formatted images. You may be used to needing to upload “the right size” image to your site for a card, and maybe a different size for a hero banner. By the time you are done, you might have half a dozen different versions of the same image depending on where it’s used.

Whether in Drupal’s media library system, or an external DAM through an API, the system that stores your assets can and should be creating the right sizes for your use cases. These “right sized” images are called derivatives. You manage the source asset which can be very high resolution, and the system will dynamically create the right sized images for you. Edit once, fix everywhere. Neat, huh? 

Acquia DAM allows us to generate those derivatives ‘on the fly’ which is to say when they are first needed and not before. This is actually similar to how Drupal’s media system and image style module works. So why is Acquia DAM an improvement if Drupal core already supports this?

Because generating those derivatives takes processing power! That processing power is something that our Drupal site could be using for other things (or rather, the server that runs it). By delegating that derivative generation to Acquia DAM, we’re making sure that we save our processing cycles (and hosting budget) for the things that Drupal has to do and letting Acquia DAM specialize in the image processing department.

Make Images Load Faster and Better

The second big thing we care about is serving those assets. That is making sure that you, a website visitor, sees an image that loads quickly. Acquia DAM can be used to deliver those assets which makes our sites fly! Drupal can do this but specialization means Acquia DAM does it better.

The Developer Experience

The last big thing we care about as developers is ease of use. It’s also called “developer experience”. There’s lots of fancy ways to describe this but a lot of the time, it comes down to how “nice” that API layer is and how well it’s documented. Acquia DAM scores high on the niceness scale for interacting with it directly.

Now it’s important to note that if you are building a Drupal site and using Acquia DAM, you probably are going to reach for the Drupal contrib ecosystem to do so. Caveat emptor! There are multiple versions of the module. The newer version acquia_dam here does promise to use those benefits of Widen we described above. At the time of writing, we’ve not yet used this in the wild. The original version of the module media_acquiadam did not. While the old module allowed your assets to be managed in Widen, it essentially copy pasted those assets to your Drupal server. So from a developer perspective, there wasn’t much benefit over core Drupal (but everyone else who benefits was still happy).

Also a note to anyone using the old module: the module maintainers do not have an official migration path for us. Sad trombone. Any migration there would need to be custom development using the Migrate API to shuffle things over to the new format. 

We are committed to bringing a seamless end-to-end experience across ours and all of our clients' platforms as we manage our content, workflow and governance. 

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