Acquia Content Hub is a cloud-based content distribution and discovery service. Customers can use this service to author, search, and share content in a complex network of sites and channels. Whether it includes multiple sites, diverse departments, or different technologies, Content Hub syndicates content and configuration at scale, and enables global enterprises to discover, reuse, and distribute content throughout their entire organization in a secure cloud environment. Content Hub syndicates content between your fleet of Drupal sites that have configuration parity.
Some of the key features of Content Hub are:
Content Hub creates a content interchange workflow between the different websites in your content network. Each of the websites in your content network owns the content it creates—content that can be shared with any other website in the network. Communication among the websites occurs through the Content Hub service using cloud-based rules that regulate how and when the content gets shared between different members of the content network. These rules are called filters.
Content Hub enables automated subscription updates from content authors to content consumers in near real time through the use of Drupal queues. Publishers create content on their websites as expected. If a new content item is one of the entity types being shared, then it (and any necessary dependencies) becomes available to subscriber websites to import. Filters can be created at a fleet-level to specify which subscribers should receive which content.
A website in a Content Hub network can act as a publisher for some content and a subscriber other content. The original publisher of a content entity controls the definitive content of the entity, and any changes made by a subscriber website that imported the content entity aren’t contributed back into Content Hub.
The main elements provided by Content Hub are as follows:
| Element | Description |
|---|---|
| Content Hub | A central content repository hosted and managed by Acquia. Using a central hub for your content enables full-text and faceted search across all the available content. |
| Content Hub client | A set of Drupal modules that manages communication with Content Hub and helps you manage how content is published and consumed. The Content Hub client gets installed on each website in the content network that has to publish or subscribe to content, or both. |
| Content Hub API | A set of open RESTful APIs you can use to interact directly with content inside or outside Drupal websites. |
| Content Hub SDK for PHP | A software development kit (SDK) for the Content Hub API. |
Content Hub 2.x aims to deliver a scalable queue-based, multi-site content syndication capability as a part of the Acquia product portfolio. With Content Hub 2.x, Acquia provides a more stable and powerful architecture to support content syndication across the widest possible range of Drupal 8 applications. This is achieved through the following technical improvements:
The differences between Content Hub 1.x and Content Hub 2.x include (but aren’t limited to):
| Feature | Content Hub 1.x | Content Hub 2.x |
|---|---|---|
| Dependency Calculation | Content Hub 1.x syndicates only content dependencies. You must manually create configuration entities such as content types, fields, or contrib-module dependencies such as paragraphs. | Dependency Calculation is the foundation of Content Hub 2.x. Every syndicated entity goes through dependency calculation and if a content or configuration dependency doesn’t exist on a subscribing website, the dependency is created. |
| Scale | Syndication can happen at the same moment when entities are created. This leads to inefficiencies at scale, requiring the use of queues. | Every entity is syndicated using Drupal queues. |
| Architecture | Content Hub 1.x was written for Drupal 7 originally. | Content Hub 2.x is built on a modern, plugin-based architecture. This allows easy developer modification for data tampering and modification of the syndication process without changing the base plugin. |
| Cloud Filters | Both publisher and subscriber modules allow for selecting entities to syndicate leading to confusion. | Publisher syndicates all content so subscribers can use filters to select the content to ingest. |
| Cloud Filters | Business logic for content filters is at the module level, leading to redundant data communication over the network. | Optimized API architecture using cloud filters allows for simpler and more efficient data exchange over the network. Filters are calculated in the service, which reduces the number of webhook requests within the Content Hub network. |
| Content Workflows | Content moderation only loosely supported. | Content moderation and content translation supported out of the box. |
| Customer Experience | Challenging to set up and onboard. | Simplified onboarding experience due to automatic recognition of existing clients and an interface for managing clients. |
| Cloud Filters | Uses filters at modules to qualify entities for syndication. | Uses cloud filters, which can be defined once and assigned to multiple sites, leading to less effort to manually set per subscriber. |
| Multilingual | Multilingual content support is very rigid and requires exact configuration on both Publisher and Subscriber sites. | Multilingual content supported out of the box. |
| Reporting and Insights | Little oversight of syndication status among a fleet of sites. | Syndication status reporting dashboard capabilities. |
| Client and webhook management | Client and webhook management through drush or API only. | Client and webhook management interface built into a Drupal UI. |
The following sections provide information about how to install and use Content Hub with websites:
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