Drupal Gardens Tour

OJC has been building "web condos" using Drupal and WordPress to make it fast and easy to launch a web site for a community organization, event, or project. Now Drupal Gardens takes the concept to a whole new level. They are unveiling a free online service to launch a Drupal-powered website without worrying about the hosting, installation, setup or ongoing security updates.

Drupal Gardens lets anyone create a Drupal site that includes all the important building blocks right out of the box:

• High-quality themes that you can select and customize online
• Existing links and navigation with sample placeholder content in every section (Home, About, Contact, etc.)
• Features and social networking including mailing lists, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news, forums, FAQs, testimonials, product pages and more
• Flexible layouts for every page
• Easy point-and-click editing for every single item
• A WYSIWYG editor that is already set up for image uploads and a media library

Drupal Gardens is built on Drupal 7 which includes accessibility features by OJC. Drupal Gardens also uses the WYSIWYG and CKEditor modules along with the Media module to provide a user-friendly experience. And Acquia has added their own Theme Builder to make style and layout changes a matter of point and click.

Drupal Gardens is currently in beta and free to start building sites today. Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal and CTO of Acquia, promises that pricing will be "value-based starting at free." A free level of service will always be available, and there will be a small cost to use your own domain name or to host sites beyond a certain volume. Enterprise packages will also be available for multi-site setups and extra security and support, Dries said in his presentation at DrupalCon 2010.

Check out the official Drupal Gardens demo and get started at DrupalGardens.com.