Drupal Gardens - Introduction and Background

Drupal Gardens went into public beta not long ago. This means that anyone now can create a site on it instantly.

This post is the first in many about Drupal Gardens. In this series I plan to cover as much as possible, from creating your first site, to going into details about the various features it offer. In this post I will give you an introduction to it, as well as what it will mean for Drupal in general.

Why Drupal Gardens was Created

When you ask people you know or post on forums on the Internet asking for advice about a platform to use to use to build a new website with, it is very likely the list of suggestions will end up with WordPress, Joomla and Drupal - In that order. When you start looking at the reasons for why people suggest these a few things will quickly put them apart.

• WordPress is the most popular, used by millions on people.
• WordPress is very easy to get started with. Including setting up a site at wordpress.com.
• WordPress is for blogging and if you need more then Joomla is the choice since it is also very easy to get started with.
• Joomla has tons of themes you can select between.
• Drupal is for developers and big websites.
• Drupal has a much higher learning curve.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. However there are some truth in that as well, but the differences are not as big as some people try to make them.

Yes, Drupal 6 and earlier does take more time to get going with. To get things like a WYSIWYG editor or especially media management working takes a lot of work. Both things that WordPress and Joomla does much better and easier out of the box.

On the other hand, Drupal is known to more secure, have better compatibility among contributed modules, scale much better as well as offer more flexibility in creating all sort of websites.

In the end you had to make a decision about getting your new website up quicker, or spend more time learning Drupal to have more future options to add new features as well as cope with more traffic.

To change this Drupal needed to be made easier to use for people with limited development skill. Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal and Acquia, recognised this when he started to draw up the goals for Drupal 7. Usability and user experience was the priority. His company also funded the work that Mark Bolton and Leisa Reichelt has done to remake the Drupal admin UI as well as the various community websites, including drupal.org that is in the works.

The result, we now can see in the alpha versions of Drupal 7, shows much promise in making Drupal easier to get started with, as well as administrate. A lot of weird terms have been changed, the Admin bar Overlay has been introduced, CCK and media management have been added to core to name a few new things.

But for Acqua this wasn't enough. Drupal 7 will still require more work. It still doesn't come with a WYSIWYG editor for example. Something else needed to happen so that anyone would be able to explore the Drupalverse, start creating sites and get into the community without needing much experience of development.

Drupal Gardens was Born

Everyone knows the success of wordpress.com. The number of sites hosted there are in the millions. Anyone can quickly create an account at have a new site up and running in no time. This is what was needed for Drupal, and thus the idea of Drupal Gardens was born at Aqcuia.

It would have been simple to just copying the formula behind wordpress.com to make a Drupal based version, but they wanted to create something more and better. Something that both took advantage of all Drupals potential and offered users new possibilities. They also wanted to this without breaking with the "Drupal Way".

Drupal Gardens is wordpress.com on Steroids

I have seen that phrase a couple of times. I don't know who first coined it though, maybe someone who knows can let us know in the comments?

In my view, it is actually not far from the truth. Drupal Gardens offers far more features and possibilities than what you can do on wordpress.com. It's built in Theme Builder is way more advanced, while still being easy to use. It is utilising the Views module, which is almost an obligation to install on any Drupal site. It has the new Drupal 7 Media module. That's just to name a few of the advanced features it offers.

No Lock-In of Users

One other goal for Acquia was to not lock in users. If any user grows out of what Drupal Gardens has to offer, then they wanted to make it simple for them to migrate their site to a stand alone installation. Therefor you have a feature where you can simply export your Drupal Gardens site and install it on your own hosting. This is a huge advantage. It enables users to prototype and test ideas, get familiar to Drupal 7 and then make a decision if Drupal Gardens is enough. If not, then simply export it, install Drupal 7 and import the site to continue the work by adding the new features. Simple and easy.

Another powerful feature is that you can create your own site templates, this is also thanks to the site export feature. Once you have built a good looking site, then you can save it as a template and quickly create new sites from it. This is great for quickly being able to create custom campaign sites for example.

On top of that Acqua has promised to keep adding new modules and features on an ongoing basis.

Free and Subscription Options

Drupal Gardens offers both free accounts as well as subscription based options. Super Drupal is the free version and then you have Superer and Superest Drupal (yeah, funny names aren't they).

The free version will have ads and your limited to a total of five support tickets, you still have access to the forums though. You are also limited to creating up to 2000 average size pages and 4,000 page views per day. You can add a custom domain, but that will cost extra. The two subscription options offers more pages, both created and views per day, unlimited support tickets, included custom domain and are also ad free. More info about the pricing model.

If you don't mind ads, then even the free version will let you create a quite busy site. You can of course upgrade to a subscription later on when you need it.

Until the end of 2010 all tiers are free. I suppose that is when it will go from beta to officially release.

How will this Help Drupal?

In my view, Drupal Gardens will be the perfect introduction to Drupal for new users. You don't need any developer skills, can create a new site in minutes and then get going customising it. Compared to the "old way" where you had to spend hours or days downloading, finding somewhere to install it, etc if you where new. This is a gigantic step in the right direction.

Since it is built on Drupal 7 it has already served the community well since its development have been going on in parallel with the Drupal 7 development. As late as yesterday, August 17, Acquia hosted a Drupal 7 Code Sprint at their office. After that sprint, Dries posted this tweet:

After slaving away at the #Drupal 7 critical issue queue all day with about 25 people, we went from 34 to 29 critical bugs. Difficult bugs!

Not long after Angie Byron (webchick), co-maintainer of Drupal 7 together with Dries tweeted:

Wow, something at @Acquia seems to have exploded today, and taken a huge chunk of the critical #Drupal 7 issues with it. Great work, folks!

I don't think I need to mention the number of re-tweets of them do I?

What is Coming?

By now I hope you have got some idea of what Drupal Gardens has to offer and want to know more. In the coming weeks I will go over everything, from how to create your site (next post), to how to take advantage of all the features available for you.

If you want to be notified about new posts about Drupal Gardens you can subscribe on the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter where I will tweet every time a new post is published.

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