Acquia Prepares Hosted Drupal CMS with Drupal Gardens

As WordPress extends its functionality more and more into the realm of CMSs, some of the former community favorites as Joomla and Drupal are losing users to WordPress, mainly due to its free WordPress hosting platform, WordPress.com.

In a move meant to keep Drupal users and developers interested in their open source CMS, Acquia, Drupal's administrator, is planning the release of their own free Drupal CMS hosting platform named Drupal Gardens.

Besides the basic Drupal CMS, the service will provide an extra feature called ThemeBuilder, as a more advanced and user-friendly GUI to style a Drupal installation. Recognized as a developer's favorite platform due to its ease in creating and modifying plugins, Drupal has been losing ground in the past two years to WordPress.

Even so, Drupal's main developers don't seem to be bothered by this, preparing the launch of a new Drupal, expected in the next two to three months. Drupal 7, still in Alpha testing, has already been tested on the Drupal Gardens platform, returning spectacular results.

For now, Drupal Gardens is still in closed beta testing, the team recently adding new features like theming options, more speed for the ThemeBuilder, improvements in design, usage guides and in-depth configuration options. Invitations can be earned on the Drupal Gardens official page.

For now, WordPress.com and Google's Blogger service seem to have the edge on Drupal Gardens, but let’s not underestimate the attachment the development community has had for the CMS, voting it two times as the best CMS of the year in the Packt CMS Awards, edging Joomla, WordPress and many other for the top prize.

Besides the introduction video on the Drupal Gardens main page, another clip has been published on Aquia's blogs as an introduction to other Drupal Gardens features. It is embedded below.



An interview with Dries Buytaert, Drupal's inventor, can also be seen below, courtesy of Allen Stern. The video was shot at the 2010 SXSW conference and offers an insight on Drupal 7 and Drupal Gardens.



Drupal CMS is available for download here.