Drupal Gardens Beta - A Giant Leap in Community Building...

I was just invited to the Drupal Gardens private beta today, and I have to say, it's a leap forward in terms of building out quick, beautiful, and well-designed websites. But it takes things many, many, many steps further than a simple Wordpress or Blogger site.

Drupal Gardens is built with Drupal at its core, and every site instance you set up is basically an entire Drupal website (and it's completely exportable, so if your needs grow beyond the Drupal Gardens garden, you can re-plant on another server). This means you can have multiple users (with multiple permission levels). You can do relatively advanced theming, right out of the box (and without knowing too much about HTML, CSS, etc.!). You can set up multiple content types and set up specialized databases and queries. There are a thousand and one things you can do with DG much more quickly than by-hand.

From nothing to full site, in about 2 minutes.

There isn't a whole lot missing from Drupal Gardens. I think it will transform the way I approach smaller website design jobs - instead of working locally and starting from scratch, I might as well build out a Gardens site (collaborating with my clients, or whomever I'm working with), then let the client take over and run with it.

Once Drupal Gardens is out of beta, expect to hear a lot more. I think this system could help a lot of parishes in a lot of ways—not the least of which is financially!