Frequently Asked Questions

Drupal Gardens is an easy-to-use service for easily creating and hosting powerful, beautiful social websites using Drupal 7, the most powerful and flexible open source social publishing system. Drupal Gardens is unique in that it allows you to design your site within your web browser using the powerful ThemeBuilder and has no vendor lock-in.  If you ever need to extend it beyond what Drupal Gardens can do, you can export it and take advantage of the thousands of modules available on drupal.org.  See the features page for more exciting details on what Drupal Gardens can do for you.

Drupal is open-source social publishing software that connects content and communities seamlessly on the web. Tens of thousands of people are using Drupal to power scores of different websites, including corporate websites, internal and external communities, ecommerce sites, product catalogs, political and government websites around the world. The Drupal community's home is at drupal.org.

Acquia helps make people successful with Drupal by providing technical support, services, and hosting for the Drupal social publishing system.    

Drupal Gardens is designed for people who want a quick, affordable way to build a website with a great design and lots of flexibility without the need for programming or IT maintenance. Core Drupal is the right choice for a large, complex site with custom functionality or integration with other systems. Drupal Gardens is a right choice for smaller sites that need to be built fast and that are satisfied by the features included in the service.

Drupal Gardens ranges in price from $11.09/month per site up to $79.95/month per site. There is also a free option for people who are trying out the product or building a prototype site. Please see the Pricing page for details.

Yes, the 1.0 version of Drupal Gardens was released on March 2, 2011.

If you know Drupal, you may wonder what benefits and features Drupal Gardens adds.  Basically, Drupal Gardens gives you additional tools to create Drupal 7 sites much faster, and the Drupal Gardens team actively manages your sites so you can ignore the drudgery of maintaining and operating them.     

Drupal Gardens is built on top of Drupal 7 to give you the best possible Drupal 7 experience by combining:

• Stock Drupal 7 + many popular Drupal 7 modules pre-installed so you can get started fast, and the list of new modules and functionality is always growing.

• A collection of user experience enhancements to make Drupal easier but not hide Drupal power - e.g., full access to JavaScript, unfiltered HTML, custom content types, etc.

• High-availability software-as-a-service (SaaS) hosting and monitoring infrastructure across multiple web servers with Varnish caching and replicated database servers.  Every site is automatically backed up daily.  A random sample of sites are daily restored to test servers and verified to ensure the integrity of backups.  All of this is based on the same Acquia Managed Cloud infrastructure that powers and protectes some of the largest and most active Drupal sites in the world.  With Drupal Gardens you can stop worrying about site speed, site traffic, disk space, uptime, and backups.

• A 24x7 operations team that keeps your site tested and up to date with all relevant Drupal core and contrib module updates and security patches so you can relax knowing your site is secure and up-to-date.

• Point-and-click theme styling in the browser via the Drupal Gardens’ ThemeBuilder, including extensive font libraries from Monotype and Typekit and the ability to add custom CSS

• Multi-site management panel so you can see all of your sites at a glance and manage their domains

• Library of beautiful, flexible themes that range from richly-styled themes to bare-bones base themes that can be dramatically altered to anything you can imagine.  See some example sites.

• Single sign-on so you (and your users) can use the same account across many sites

• Duplicate a site or theme as needed with a click

• Professional Drupal support and how-to guidance (even for custom CSS)  provided by Acquia support

• No vendor lock-in. If you need a module that Drupal Gardens doesn't yet provide, just export your site and host it yourself, and add any module you need.

• Get started for free!

The following browsers and platforms are tested regularly with Drupal Gardens.  If you see any problems, please report them in the forums.

• Firefox (current version on Mac, Windows, Linux)
• Safari 5 (Mac, not Windows)
• Chrome (current version on Mac and Windows)
• Internet Explorer 8 and 9
• Mobile browsers such as iPhone, Android, and iPad

Note that for the best experience designing your site appearance with the Drupal Gardens ThemeBuilder, Firefox is recommended.

Internet Explorer 7, Safari 4, and Firefox 3.5 and older versions of these browsers are not supported for editing sites.

Yes. Your site will start with a drupalgardens domain, e.g., mysite.drupalgardens.com. But you can change the URL to any domain that you own, e.g., mysite.com if you are on the Basic plan or higher. Here are the instructions for using your own domain.

We've designed the ThemeBuilder to be flexible enough to create most themes. So while you can't upload an existing theme, you should be able to recreate it with the ThemeBuilder. If there are certain things you can't do, please let us know in the Drupal Gardens forums.

Yes, you can duplicate your site and use it as a template for a new site. Duplicating a site will copy theme, saved themes, modules, and settings. Users who have either the Site Maintainer or the Administrator role will be copied, along with the content that they created.

Yes. If your site grows beyond the functionality that Drupal Gardens provides, you can export it at any time and install it on your local computer or any Drupal-compatible web hosting such as Acquia Dev Cloud. The export includes Drupal 7, your database, themes, content, modules, site and module configuration settings, and users. After you've exported, you can add any Drupal 7-compatible contributed modules, new functionality, or get help from Drupal professionals to add new features and much more.  You can think of it this way: Acquia owns the Drupal Gardens platform, but you own your site.

To move your Drupal Gardens site to Acquia Dev Cloud, just follow these steps:

1. Buy an Acquia Network Developer subscription - during this process you will be prompted for the size of server you want to use for your site.
2. Visit your Drupal Gardens My Sites page and click Export. Save the file downloaded.
3. Visit the Acquia Dev Cloud Install page and click Import.  Select the file you downloaded.
4. If you have a custom domain, visit the Acquia Dev Cloud Domains page and add your custom domain, if you have one.  Then visit your DNS provider and change the IP address to the value shown on the Acquia Dev Cloud Domains page.
5. That's it!

We'll be working on a site import feature soon. Please log in to the Gardens forums and let us know where you want to import from.

You can buy Drupal Gardens plans now by clicking the Upgrade link on the /mysites page for your site.

Please see our Pricing page to see pricing for the Drupal Gardens subscription plans. All pricing is per-site.

The pricing is per site. For example, the Basic plan costs $11.95/month for a site or $99/year for a site. If you have two sites on the Basic plan, your monthly fee will be $23.90/month.

Log into Drupal Gardens and click the My sites link at the top right side of the page. Once you're on the My sites page, click the Upgrade link next to the site that needs a subscription.  Here's a screen shot.

If your site is using the Drupal Gardens Basic and above plans you can assign up to 5 of your own custom domains to your site.  You can assign one custom domain to your site at your /mysites page - to go beyond one custom domain (up to the max of 5)  just make a request to Drupal Gardens support.

To see a list of your past bills and download your invoices, follow these steps:

1. Log into drupalgardens.com and click on your username at the top right side of the screen, eg. Hello username.

2. Click on the Biling history link.

Note, if you want to access Billing history from one of your sites on Drupal Gardens, then click on the My sites link at the top right. This will bring you over to the main Drupal Gardens site where you can follow steps 1 and 2 above.

When the Drupal Gardens subscription plan limits go into effect (for new sites on March 2 and for existing sites on March 31st) the following limits will be enforced:

User limit
The user limit on the free Starter plan is 5 users, which includes you. If you have a beta site with over 5 users, you'll have to upgrade your site to add new users. We will send you an email to let you know that you're over the Starter limit and to remind you to upgrade if you want to keep your users. If you decide not to upgrade, then we will block all but the first 5 users who joined your site. Once you upgrade your site, you can unblock your users.

Storage
The free Starter plan offers 50 MB of storage. If your beta site is using more storage than that, you'll have to upgrade to a higher plan in order to add new files (images, video, attached files). But don't worry, your existing content won't be touched. Consider it a thank you for being a beta tester.

Bandwidth
The Starter plan offers 5 GB of bandwidth. If your site traffic is high enough to cause you to use more bandwidth than what is allowed in the free plan, then you will receive an email asking you to upgrade to a plan with a higher bandwidth limit

Webform responses
The Starter plan offers 100 responses per webform. If your webform receives more than 100 responses, you'll only be able to see the first 100 until you upgrade to a higher plan.

Support
The Starter plan offers forum support but you will have to purchase a Professional, Premium, or Unlimited subscription in order to create support tickets. You will still be able to access the tickets that you created during the beta period.

You can pay for your Drupal Gardens sites with a major credit card.

You can pay for your site on a monthly basis and your credit card will be charged at the beginning of every month. You can also pay for your site a year in advance.

Yes, you will be charged automatically every month for monthly subscriptions and at the beginning of every year for yearly subscriptions. As long as your credit card is current and valid, you don't need to act in order for your subscription to renew. If your credit card is near its expiration date, you'll get an email reminding you to update it.

When the pricing takes effect, you can upgrade your site to a higher subscription plan at any time. If you upgrade in the middle of your monthly or annual term, you will be charged at a prorated amount of the higher plan for the remainder of the term. Visit your My Sites page and click Upgrade to start the upgrade process.

To change your billing information (e.g. name, address, credit card), log into Drupal Gardens, then select "Hello (username)" in the top right corner. Under "Billing" select "Edit my billing info." Here is a screen shot.

Please note that all sites in a single Gardens account are billed to the credit card on file. If you want to use different credit cards for each of your sites, create a new account for each site or transfer site ownership to another existing account.

The Unlimited plan gives you a site without limits on your storage or bandwidth, as long as you don't use your Drupal Gardens site as a file server.

When pricing goes into effect and you reach your site member limit, your users will see a message telling them that the site administrator must approve their registration before they can join. The user will appear on your People page as a blocked user. When you upgrade your site in order to have a higher member limit, you will be able to unblock any users that tried to join.

When pricing goes into effect and you reach your limit, your site visitors will be able to submit new webform responses but you won't be able to see the responses until you upgrade to a higher plan.

You can cancel a subscription if it a monthly subscription but not if it is an annual subscription. If you want to cancel your monthly subscription, initiate a cancellation request by completing the Site Cancellation form. Once the site has been cancelled, your site will be downgraded to Starter level (no cost). If you wish to delete the site, log in to your site and navigate to "My sites" and choose More > Delete site option.

All sites in a single Gardens account are billed to the credit card on file. If you want to use different credit cards for each of your sites, either create a new account for each site or transfer site ownership  to another existing account.

You can transfer ownership of a site to another person by following these steps:

1. Ask the person to join your site so they get an account on the system.

2. Follow these steps

Since all sites in a single Gardens account are billed to the credit card on file, you have to either create a new account for each site or transfer site ownership to another existing account.

If you can't find the information you need in this FAQ, then please go to the Pricing and billing question form to send us your questions.

So we can provide an optimal experience for all our free active site owners, free sites that are inactive for 85 days will be archived and removed from Drupal Gardens. To keep your free site active, you must generate a modest number of page views, or log in at least once every 30 days. If we detect 30 or 60 days of inactivity, we'll send you email reminders. Free sites that are inactive for 85 days or more will be archived due to prolonged inactivity. Please actively maintain your free site! Alternatively, you can choose to pay for your site, and it can be as inactive as you want.

A free site is considered inactive when the site owner has not logged in to the site, and has a low number of page views within a 30-day period.

Site owners will be notified by e-mail when their site has been inactive for 30 days or more. Site owners should log in to their site at least once every 30 days to keep their site active; alternatively, they can choose to delete their site if it is no longer needed.

If the site owner does not log in to their site following 85 days of prolonged inactivity, the site will be subject to the Drupal Gardens inactive site policy.

When you are notified of an inactive free site, please log in to the site as soon as possible so that it remains active. If you received the 60-day inactivity alert and failed to log in to the free site within 25 days of receiving the alert, your inactive site's content will be archived. Don't worry though! Your user account won't be touched and you'll still have access to your archived site's code, database, and files.

If your free site is archived, we'll send you an email with an URL that allows you to download the archived site content for up to a year from the date of archive. Then you can install the archived site content on your local machine using the free Acquia Dev Desktop, or you can upload it to any hosting provider that supports Drupal 7 sites, including Acquia Dev Cloud. Note: you cannot re-import the archive back into the Drupal Gardens service.

If you have any questions regarding the Drupal Gardens inactive free site policy, or feel that you are receiving email notifications in error, please contact us at http://www.drupalgardens.com/contact.

On September 29, 2011, some inactive site email notifications did not include a date.  If you received such an email on that date, your site will be archived on October 31, 2011 if you do not act.

The first step is to sign up for an account on DrupalGardens.com.  Next, submit a partner application to the Drupal Gardens Partner directory. Be sure to upload images from your best work and highlight your experience on with Drupal Gardens. We will review your submission and publish your page to the directory.

We review submissions to ensure they are relevant, and they demonstrate some familiarity with the Drupal Gardens service. We encourage you to showcase work that you have already built in Drupal Gardens.  We also review submissions to prevent spam or offensive materials.

Most importantly, you can attract new business for your web services firm. You can also get advanced notification and access to new features in Drupal Gardens, as they become available.

If you find a firm that you like and would like to consider hiring them for a project, or just want to learn more about the firm, you will find their contact information on their dedicated partner page. Please contact them directly, they would love to hear from you.

When you are ready to hire a firm to work on your site, the transaction is between you and the firm. Its a peer-to-peer engagement, service providers and clients should evaluate one another closely, as relationships are between the two parties. The Drupal Gardens Partner directory is simply a place for clients to meet firms - once connected, everyone else is on their own.

Any services provider is free to create a page in the Drupal Gardens Partner directory. We review the submissions prior to posting, but do not make any warranties or guarantees about the quality of the firm's work. If you suspect fraud or dishonest behavior, such as displaying work that isn't theirs, please let us know and we will investigate.

We do not currently offer a partner reseller program for Drupal Gardens. You can purchase a site on behalf of your client and bill them yourselves. Alternatively, you can build a site for your client first, then upgrade their site to a paid account upon delivery. 

One of the best ways to increase your visibility is to participate in the forums. We encourage potential customers to use the forums to research prospective service providers and evaluate their technical prowess. We are exploring community rewards programs in the forums, including badges for participation, to help our partners increase their visibility within the Gardens community.  

The Drupal Gardens Partner directory is separate from the Acquia partner program and a firm can join both programs, and be listed in both directories, if they so choose. For more details, please see http://acquia.com/partners