First foray into Drupal Gardens

I've been dabbling with Drupal Gardens off and on for a couple months now. It's a hosted solution similar to WordPress.com, but much more full-featured. In addition to blogging, Drupal Gardens offers forums, custom content types and a stripped down version of regular Drupal's Views. Drupal Gardens stresses its social aspects (hence the "Gardens" methinks). One can create multiple sites with a single sign on account -- Gardens calls these "microsites," but I think this term is a little misleading because it doesn't look like the sites need to be small. In addition to the ability to create community sites such as forums, there is also a module to manage links to Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, complete with little icons.

Drupal Gardens is built on Drupal 7, so my futzing around had the added bonus of a neat little D7 preview. Perhaps one of the coolest features, Gardens allows you to export a site's files and database and install it somewhere else as a regular D7 install. So this means that one could theoretically build a Gardens site with the full intent of exporting it to a different hosting provider, rather than installing and configuring regular Drupal from scratch.

Non-technical users who want to get a site up and running quickly are the target audience. Drupal Gardens boasts pre-packaged templates that can be customized within the web interface itself. These scale very nicely to varying user ability. Even non-technical users can choose one of seven pre-packaged templates, change the color palette, upload a logo, and voila! There are a variety of columned layouts to chose from, and these can be customized on a page by page basis. Users can even change colors, spacing and background properties for elements, all within the web interface. And finally, users who are familiar with CSS can override existing styles with a custom stylesheet.

Gardens has a tiered pricing plan, including an ad-supported free version. All versions are free during 2010, however. Domain mapping is also available, so you can map a custom domain (such as christinadulude.com) to a Drupal Gardens site. I ported my old site over from WordPress. Manually -- it doesn't look like Gardens has an import function. This is one time it pays to be an infrequent blogger, I suppose.

As a web developer, and a Drupal developer especially, I'm really not the intended Drupal Gardens user. However, I can think of at least one situation where Drupal Gardens would be a great fit. Last year, I built a website for a psychologist in the Boston area. His budget was small, and his requirements were simple and straightforward. He wanted a brochure style site to list information about his practice, blogging functionality, a podcast, the ability to pull in recent Twitter posts, and links to his presence on various social networking sites. I built the website in WordPress, and it fit his needs just fine. However, this client could have just as easily -- if not more easily -- built the site himself in Drupal Gardens. Sure, he would have to pay for the domain name mapping once Gardens moves out of beta, and he probably would want to opt for one of the non-ad supported plans. But, he wouldn't have had to pay me to design and build the site.

Collaborative group space would be another practical use for Drupal Gardens. I participate in a local professional group called Triangle Web Women. Our website is currently hosted on Ning.com, a do-it-yourself social networking service. Ning allows users to create account profiles, post and RSVP to events, and foster discussions on bulletin boards. However, TriWebWomen could just as easily be a Drupal Gardens site, which would have provided even more functionality. And, with Ning recently announcing the company will phase out its free service, groups who'd like to set up a collaborative site might want to check out Drupal Gardens.

As for me, I'm planning to export christinadulude.com to a regular Drupal install on my shared host at some point. But in the meantime I'm looking forward to seeing how Drupal Gardens progresses as it moves out of beta.