Drupal software, support, and hosting company Acquia announced that its Drupal Gardens leaves private beta today. Drupal Gardens is a content management & social publishing system, offering “Drupal-as-a-service” and greatly simplifying the creation and management of Drupal websites.
Prior to Drupal Gardens, those wanting to utilize Drupal to build their sites had to download and install the code themselves.
In some ways then, Drupal Gardens is the WordPress.com for Drupal, although Drupal and Drupal Gardens are feature-rich, offering more than just a blogging platform. But like WordPress.com, Drupal Gardens may be an avenue that facilitates the open source platform’s adoption. Drupal Gardens is hosted on Acquia’s servers; there are no downloads or installation, and there are multiple templates for users to design and customize their own site layouts.
Drupal’s adoption has been on the rise with its implementation by a number of high-profile websites, including NASA, The Onion, and the White House. More than 500,000 websites are now registered with drupal.org.
The Drupal Gardens project has been in development for more than a year and already boasts over 12,000 sites. One of the features as part of today’s release is simplified site duplication. This allows users to clone an existing site, including its design, functionality, information architecture and content. This is a play for the enterprise, says Acquia co-founder and Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, as it will allow site builders to quickly roll out new microsites.
Drupal Gardens will be free for all users until the end of 2010, when it will implement a pricing structure based on site size and traffic. The platform also features a one-click export button, so there is no lock-in to Drupal Gardens.
