Acquia Cohesion: Empower your Non-Developers to Build Drupal Websites Four Times Faster

What is Acquia Cohesion? What challenges that you're facing nowadays does it help you solve?

Or, if you want to put it this way:

How does this Acquia & Cohesion DX8 solution enable your organization to align with the "do more with less" agile trend?

In this respect, in today's blog post we'll:
 

1. define this Acquia product focusing on what sets it apart from other website builders out there
2. identify your organization's specific needs, that Acquia Cohesion's designed to addresses
3. highlight some of its most powerful and...  empowering features 

1. What Is Acquia Cohesion?
 

It's a low-code Drupal add-on that empowers less technical people in your team — content authors, marketers, designers — to build websites faster and cheaper via a simple drag-and-drop user interface.

In short: it simplifies the whole Drupal site-building process.

It gives power to non-dev teams to:
 

• come up with new designs
• set up new layouts
• create web pages
• use components site-wide, while selecting different styles to boost the user experience
• assemble new Drupal websites from scratch
   

No CSS, PHP, HTML or Drupal theming knowledge required...

Now, just imagine:
 

• how much time your developers would gain, time that they could then invest in more innovative work instead
• how much easier it'll be for your non-developers to be 100% brand compliant
• how much faster it'll get to launch new websites whenever needed
• how much simpler it'll get for your non-technical team to manage hundreds, even thousands of Drupal websites
   

2. Why Did Acquia Acquired Cohesion?

Well, for 3 obvious reasons. Acquia wanted to enable organizations to:
 

1. launch their Drupal websites faster (up to four times faster)
2. achieve brand consistency across their ecosystems of websites
3. grant their non-dev teams more freedom and more control over the website infrastructures that they manage
    

In a few words: Cohesion DX8 makes Drupal (even) more accessible to companies worldwide.
 

3. 4 Signs that Your Company Needs this Low-Code Site Builder
 

Quote's source: Dries Buytaert's blog.

Let's take these 4 scenarios and see if you can relate:
 

1. your team's striving to "juggle with" 100s of Drupal websites, each one carrying its own network of e-commerce and social media tools and integrations
2. your short-term strategy includes launching... a few more scalable 100s websites
3. your marketers and content creators always need to wait in line for the development team to do its own work before they get to add any content to your new websites
4. your non-technical team depends on the development team for every content update they need to make (swapping a text box with an image, updating the layout...)
    

Are these challenges all too familiar to you?

Then you're definitely one of Acquia Cohesion's target users:

An organization looking to reduce their build times dramatically and to streamline the management of hundreds or even thousands of Drupal websites.
 

4. Real-Life Example of Acquia Cohesion "In Action"
 

Quote's source: Information Age.

Bayer is such an organization that recognized this site builder's potential and used it to overcome the challenges that it was then facing:
 

• building thousands of standardized websites fast(er)
• granting their non-dev team "independence" from developers to create Drupal websites at scale
   

5. Features You'll Want to Try First

Now that we've tackled your "Why" questions, let's address your "How" question, as well:

How do you make the most of Acquia Cohesion? 

Therefore, we've hand-picked the 3 of its most powerful (and empowering) features that you'll be tempted to explore and exploit first:
 

5.1. In-Context Editing

In-browser, on-page editing couldn't get any more convenient than this:

Your content editor would just need to click anywhere on the web page where they need to make the update, hit the "Quick Edit" button and... edit it.

From making changes to the content itself to updating the layout of the page and settings, your editorial team can make changes on the fly.

Where do you add that the permissions control system helps them keep track of who has access to what.

5.2. Style Builder

The style builder that Acquia Cohesion ships with provides your design team with minimal coding experience components that they can easily:
 

• drag and drop
• arrange
• assembly
   

... to their liking to create unique page layouts.

Thus, they get to put together their own templates right in the browser.

Note: feel free to go beyond the built-in styles and to get the most of the CSS properties and selectors.
 

5.3. Design Replication

Just imagine: what if you could reuse one of your current Drupal site's design and style configuration across your other hundreds of websites?

What if you could sync templates, components, brand styles across your global network of sites... faster and easier than ever before?

Well, Acquia Cohesion stores that kind of power. You just need to... unlock it and use it to your advantage.
 

The END!

These are the key benefits that you can reap from using Acquia Cohesion within your organization.

Do you find them strong enough to choose this particular website builder?


Image by Chris Wolf from Pixabay