Drupal Gardens was upgraded yesterday and one of the exciting features you'll see is a Site duplication feature. You can build a site, duplicate it, and use the copy as a starting place for a new site. The duplicated site will have your theme and all your saved themes, your modules, and settings. Users who have the Site owner or Administration roles will be copied, along with the content they created.

Back when Drupal Gardens was still on the whiteboard, this was one of the features we thought would be great. Users agreed and it's been on the most requested features list for months. Being able to duplicate a site will save people days of work and give them a way to have consistent theme and branding across a large set of themes.

People are getting clever with how they'll use this feature. Here are a couple of stories from our beta testers:

The web team at a large university is flooded with requests for new sites. They'll create a set of site templates (faculty site, event site, project site) that have the university's branding and standard header and footer. Then they'll duplicate the relevant template each time someone needs a new site. This will save them days of work.

A web designer spends most of her time on large projects, but gets tons of requests from clients with small budgets. To make these small projects profitable, she'll let her clients select from a set of pre-designed themes. She'll duplicate the site that has the selected theme, use the copied site as a template, customize it a bit - and voila! The designer spends hours, not days, on the project and her client gets an affordable site. Everyone's happy.

To duplicate your site, go to your My sites page and click on the Actions link next to your site.

Want to win an iPad like our last winners did?   To qualify for the contest:

1. If you don't already have a Drupal Gardens site, Signup for the beta - no worries, it's free.
2. Click to create a site and go wild with the Drupal Gardens ThemeBuilder to customize your design.  One of our last winners created her site on a day.  You can too!  Feel free to use both the ThemeBuilder and its Advanced tab with custom CSS to to push your design to the limits.
3. Add a link to your Drupal Gardens site in the Drupal Gardens Showcase Forum. 

We're looking for unique, beautiful sites to show in a Drupalgardens.com showcase, so some of you may see your theme design featured on the site.  The deadline is September 30th and a panel of judges will pick the best design. We'll announce the winner in the Forum and in a blog post on Drupalgardens.com.

The best design will win an Apple iPad - so enter today!

I'm not a CSS expert, so I love that I can create beautiful themes for my sites without writing a line of code. Ok, a real designer wouldn't call my themes beautiful, but they look good to me. We designed the ThemeBuilder both for people who aren't fluent in CSS and for professional designers who need to create sophisticated themes for their sites. When we released the first version of the ThemeBuilder, designers told us that the ThemeBuilder was limiting. As one designer told me, using the ThemeBuilder was like "themeing with mittens". We took this feedback and went back to the drawing board to rebuild our themes and add a lot more power to the ThemeBuilder. The latest release of the ThemeBuilder gives you the option of working in a Power theming mode to take advantage of new feautures.

Here's a quick 2 min video to show you what this feature looks like:

If you don't have time for a video, then here are a couple of screenshots of the ThemeBuilder turned off and on.

With power theming turned off, you'll click on an area of your page and the ThemeBuilder will select the regions that are most commonly styled, like the header, navigation, or sidebar regions.

When you you turn on power themeing, the ThemeBuilder gives you access to more specific areas so you can do more fine-grained styling.

To learn more about how the themes work in Drupal Gardens, read these blog posts by Jesse Beach, one of our engineers. Her first is an intro to ThemeBuilder theming, followed by one describing stacks, wrappers, and columns.

When we started planning Drupal Gardens 18 months ago one of our goals was to help break down the barriers to creating stunning Drupal web sites. To that end we developed the Drupal Gardens' ThemeBuilder -- to allow people to point and click to create uniquely designed web sites, even if they don't know what CSS is or don't have the time to learn Drupal 7's powerful theme system. While the early beta versions of the ThemeBuilder went a long way, our beta testers asked for more, and rightly so.  At the time it was difficult or impossible to add custom image borders and backgrounds around some sections of their site, and they couldn't implement fluid-width columns, or custom page widths. Also designers with a strong vision spent a significant amount of time undoing the styles in our starter-themes instead of building up their masterpiece from a blank slate.  In addition, sometimes there were not enough hooks available to attach custom styles, which prevented our beta testers from creating some amazingly unique designs. 

Thankfully, the Drupal Gardens team is pretty good at listening. After absorbing the requests that we heard in our forums, usability tests and in many conversations, we decided what was needed was a rethinking of the Drupal Gardens themes from the ground up to address those concerns. In addition, we needed to enhance the ThemeBuilder to let power users access all the underlying structure of the themes without resorting to Firebug and writing CSS (which Drupal Gardens still lets you do -- in the rare case you need to). All of this new power isn't for everyone, and so we made sure most folks can still just pick a theme and click and style it to make it their own. But when the mittens have to come off so you can intricately style your site exactly as needed, you can now turn on a new "Power theming" switch to access a powerful new CSS Navigator and element selector to reveal every detail of of the Drupal Gardens themes. We have seen some of the fruits of this effort already - less than 1 day after posting the update one of our users created this unique site and we see hundreds more unique sites sprouting. We are pretty excited to see how people use these new gardening tools!

On to the meat of this release. Here is what's new:

• Updated all sites to Drupal 7 Alpha 5 + all core changes through May 31. For a complete list of what is new, see the Drupal 7 Alpha 5 release notes or the raw CVS commit messages from May 14 to May 31.
• Enabled Mollom comment spam blocking on all sites.  Every site has been provisioned with a Mollom account and comments made on the site will be protected.  You can turn on Mollom protection for most other Drupal forms as well.  You may choose to disable Mollom as long as you first turn on comment moderation for anonymous users.   
• Added a new "Bare bones" theme which contains no styling at all (no borders, no colors, no font styles, etc.)  Use this theme if you want to start completely from scratch and build up from a base to create your own theme masterpiece.
• Restructured and updated all themes to make them very flexible, standard, accessible, and SEO friendly.  The benefits are significant including:
  • Easier ThemeBuilder styling:  Now more than ever, the first thing you click on will be the element you want to style -- without resorting to use of the element selector (now hidden under Power theming, see below).
  • Flexible width support: Containers within the "page" element have fluid width styling.  The page width can be easily resized from 0 to 1100px.  The default is 960px wide.
  • Flexible gridding with fluid-width columns: All columns can be re-sized with the ThemeBuilder.  By default, they distribute evenly across a row according to the visible content.
  • Standardized HTML Structure: All themes are based on a standard structure so it is possible to start with any one theme like Kenwood and eventually style it to look like any other theme such as Campaign or Impact.
  • Better SEO: The h1 tag is always used exclusively for the node title on a node page. No more than one h1 is used per page which is important for search engine optimization.
  • More accessible:  Every Gardens theme page has a "skip to content" link just inside the body tag to provide a shortcut to screen-reading browsers and keyboard support.
  • Plenty of styling hooks: There are now a sufficient number of wrapping elements to reproduce nearly any design while satisfying Internet Explorer's lack of support for CSS 3 styles.  The structure of blocks now includes hooks for top and bottom cap decoration as well as an inner wrapping element that can be used to style the vertical edges or background of blocks.
  • New styling elements: Each top-level container (page, header, content, and footer) contains decoration structures.  With them you can place background images and styles that are not dependent on content, separating how your theme looks from the data it presents.
• New Power theming.  While Power theming is off (the default ThemeBuilder behavior) you simply point, click and style your site.   If you need more fine-grained control over what you are styling,  click to turn Power theming  on and you will be able to:
  • Select many more theme elements with the new CSS Navigator.  After selecting any element on your theme, arrows will appear next to it allowing you to select the element's parent, first child, or sibling element (basically traversing the DOM to access elements hidden from the point and click method).  This is very useful to find the right element for the style change you need, and see the theme's structure.
  • Access the Element selector to control the scope of your styling.  e.g. style all h2s identically or only style the h2s located in your theme's sidebar.  Or style how any element appears in the hover state, active state, etc.
• Fixed many bugs as reported by our awesome beta testers.

Are you a CSS junkie? 
If you want to learn more about the structure of the Drupal Gardens themes, our own Jesse Beach who lead the effort has started writing about them on her blog.  Check it out.

Haven't tried Drupal Gardens yet? 
We are sending out invitations all the time - just sign up and we'll get one out to you ASAP!