Drupal Gardens - Create New Account and Your First Website

Drupal Gardens is a cloud based SaaS (Software as a Service) provided by Acquia that lets you create websites using Drupal 7 quickly and without any technical or developer experience. In this post I will walk you through how to create your user account as well as your first site.

Creating your Drupal Gardens site is easy. Simply follow these steps:

1. Go to drupalgardens.com. Watch the video for a teaser on what you can do and how it works.
2. Click the Get Started button.
3. Fill in the form. The form also contains fields for your account, so that is created at the same time. If you already have an account you can click on the Already a member? link at the bottom right and create a new site from there.
4. Click the Continue button.

Once you have passed the verifications, such as unique site URL, username and of course the CAPTCHA, you will get the the site template screen. At the same time a verification email is sent to the email address you entered. You need to click on the link in it within 10 days, otherwise you risk getting your site deleted. This verification is also needed to allow you to create more than one site.

Selecting Site Template

On this page you can select between a few site creation templates; Blog, Corporate, Campaign and from scratch. I had a look at each of them and the default settings is rather decent and balanced. I opted for the blog template without changing the default setting, assuming I will have access to change these options once the site is created.

When you are happy with the settings, just click on the on the Create site button. The process of setting up your new site takes less than a minute. You will also receive a new email informing you about that it is ready.

Your New Blog Site

Now you get to your site and if you already played with any of the Drupal 7 releases you will recognise the Admin and Shortcut bar at the top, as well as the contextual gear icons when moving the mouse pointer over the different parts of the page.

Personally I got a little disappointed about the default theme. Its very blocky and the combination of gray and orange is not very appealing in my book. Maybe the idea is to have it this simple so new users really feel they need to change it quickly?

Clicking on the Admin links will open the overlay and present you with the same screens as comes with the stand alone version of Drupal 7, with a few exceptions:

• Appearance - This will open Drupal Gardens own Theme Builder application in an overlay at the bottom of the screen. There seems to be no access to Drupal 7's own Theme settings, you have to use this one. More about the Theme Builder in a later post in this series.
• My sites - This will open Drupal gardens Site manager, where you can administrate the sites you have created for this account. One thing I don't like here is that it will take you away from your site. I would have preferred if it had opened in the Overlay or in a new tab/window so I quickly can get back to working on my site.

• Help - This too is a bit tweaked from the standard Drupal 7 installation. When you click on it, it will expand an area above the Admin bar to present you with links to all the help options available. This I like since its easy to access, it even has its own search so you can quickly find what your looking for. Only quirk I found was that it wasn't obvious how to collapse it again. To do that you have to click on the Help button again. A close button, or renaming Help to Close help would be nice here.

Conclusion

Creating a new site, including a new user account, is quick and painless. Unless you get stuck on selecting site name, username, it won't take you more than a few minutes and you will be ready to start customising it.

Acquia has made a good job making the user interface easy to navigate and follow. There are tons of useful documentation and videos in the help section. The community forums are quite busy with people helping each other.

One thing that is a little annoying is that some features, such as the My Sites link, or the Feedback button to the left when creating a new site, opens the new page in the same window. In forms or when logged in as administrator I would prefer such links to either warn about that I am about to navigate away from the form, open in a new window/tab or using the Overlay.

As mentioned in my Drupal Gardens - Introduction and Background post yesterday, the free account allows to you create a pretty big and busy site with up to 2,000 pages and 4,000 page views per day. If you need more there are affordable subscription options where you get more as well as other features.

In future posts I will continue to work on nutshell.drupalgardens.com and keep posting about it. I will go over how to customise it to how I want it and then later stat exploring the more advanced features Drupal gardens has to offer.

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