Drupal Gardens

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:

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.

In my First Impressions of Drupal 7 alpha 6 post, two weeks ago, I wrote that I was planning to update Nutshell to the new alpha. Unfortunately I haven't done that yet. This is mainly due to that I am involved in several large website projects and simple haven't had the time for it.

In a blog post Dries Buytaert just announced that Drupal Gardens now have more than 10,000 sites.

Considering that it was launched as a private beta as recently as late January this year, and you still have to apply for beta access this speaks volumes about the interest for Drupal.

On average that is about 100 new account each day, including the limited private beta period in the beginning.

The whole Drupal community has only one thing in mind - When will Drupal 7 be released? Currently D7, as the community calls it, is in its 5th alpha release and there are still around 80 or so bugs marked as critical.

The first beta will not be released until the number of critical bugs are zero. Current pace indicates that we should see the first beta sometime this summer. Since I am as eager as everyone else I can't wait for the real release, but that is longer away as after beta there will be release candidates.