Drupal Gardens
Druplipet, a Drupal chia pet
And the answer to yesterday's "Eye grow Drupal" question is: Druplipets. Hundreds of cute little Druplipets, your friendly Druplicon chia pet. Druplipet is the newest member of the Acquia and Drupal Gardens family and will be making appearances at industry events this year. It is making its first appearance at SXSW along with a fun contest. Needless to say, Drupal chia pets are fun and powerful stuff!
Drupal Gardens launches in private beta
I have a pretty big update for you: we just launched Drupal Gardens into private beta. Since the first public Drupal Gardens demo at DrupalCon Paris, a lot of progress has been made. Today, we sent private beta invites to the first people that signed up to be beta testers, and if things go well, we'll send out a couple thousand more invitations over the next few weeks.
For those who received an invite, building Drupal sites just got easier. Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal so you don't have to worry about installation, hosting or upgrading. Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning, except that it comes with the power of Drupal. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens should be a great tool for organizations that want to build social sites. For those of you who would like to also test drive Drupal Gardens, you can sign up to request a beta on drupalgardens.com and we'll be releasing more registration codes during the next few months of beta testing. We'll run in private beta for a bit and then open up to a public beta as we get closer to a final launch in early spring.
At Acquia, one of our goals has always been to help spread the adoption of Drupal. Hence, we have decided to make Drupal Gardens available for free until the end of 2010. By the end of 2010 we hope to have built all of the important features that will enable organizations to create feature-rich, social microsites. Our current thinking is that after 2010, there will continue to be a free tier for smaller sites but that there will also be paid tiers for larger websites or those who want access to premium features. There is a lot of work ahead of us and we need your help in the Gardens deciding what to plant, what to water and what to weed. We (at Acquia) can't wait to hear what you've got to say!
From a technical point of view, I'd like to point out this is a "real" beta launch. Drupal Gardens is a gem in the rough, built on the Drupal 7 core - currently in an alpha release - extended with functionality such as a WYSIWYG editor (CKeditor), media management, a theme builder, and basic "query builder" (i.e. simpleviews) capability. We're working with the various module maintainers, and contributing back almost all of our development efforts to the Drupal community.
Architecturally, Drupal Gardens is built on the ideas of an open social web; we markup data with RDFa, we implemented single-sign on using OpenID as our identity layer, we integrate with third-party services, and we allow people to export the code, the theme and data that makes up their site. We'll be sharing more technical details as we make progress, but we like to believe it will be a hosted service "done right".
I'd like to thank our alpha testers who have provided us some great feedback so far, the team at Acquia for working hard to get to private beta, and for the community for all the work on Drupal 7. I look forward to more people having the chance to test out Drupal Gardens and seeing what grows!
Drupal Gardens
Acquia had two big product announcements at DrupalCon Paris. The first was the general availability of Acquia Hosting, which I'll blog about tomorrow. The second is a status update on "Acquia Gardens" which we first announced in the beginning of 2009.
For those who have not heard about Acquia Gardens, this product will provide an easy on-ramp for people to experience the awesome power of Drupal without having to worry about installation, hosting and upgrading. Think of it as Wordpress.com or Ning for Drupal. Think of it as 'Drupal as a service'.
We announced that the final name for the product is Drupal Gardens. This service is Drupal, so including Drupal in the name emphasizes that point. Plus, this is all about promoting Drupal so we don't want to hide that. Our goal is to make the base service free of charge, and to introduce Drupal to hundreds of thousands of users. Many individuals and organizations want a killer web site, but have no idea that Drupal is a great way to build one or to connect with other websites. Even if they did hear about Drupal, few non-technical people succeed in installing and hosting a Drupal site. I believe Drupal Gardens could play a key role in promoting the viral adoption of Drupal, and the name Drupal Gardens is key to that.
For the same reason, I'd really like Drupal Gardens to stay close to what Drupal does, to work with module maintainers, and give back where we can. For example, it would be awesome if Gardens users could contribute to Gardens, simply by contributing to Drupal -- either by contributing to existing modules that we use to build Gardens, or to new modules that Acquia might contribute. Along the same lines, we want people to be able to export their Gardens site -- the code, the theme and data -- and move of the platform to a any Drupal hosting environment. By doing so, we provide people an easy on-ramp but we allow them to grow beyond the capabilities of Gardens without locking them in. These are the kind of win-win situations that I hope we can create.
We also showed a demo of the current state of Drupal Gardens. The product is in pre-alpha, but we wanted to give you an update and show what we've been working on. The main feature that I demonstrated in my Acquia presentation is a tool we developed called the "theme builder". The theme builder makes it really easy to build a beautiful design for your Drupal site from within your browser without having to write any HTML, CSS or Javascript. The theme builder is enabling technology, and certainly part of my vision of what content management systems should enable users to do: empowering them to quickly and easily assemble powerful websites without having to do any programming.
The theme builder comes with pre-defined themes to start from.
The theme builder comes with a basic layout manager.
The theme builder comes with pre-defined themes to start from, color palettes and a custom color selector.
The current plan is to be in the market the beginning of 2010. Gardens is built on, and depends on, the release of Drupal 7. While we don't yet have the exact timing for this (Drupal 7 is ready when it is ready), we do plan to start inviting people to start alpha testing in the next couple of months. If you are interested in taking part in the alpha program, or if you'd like to get notified about the progress of the product, sign up at drupalgardens.com.
