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 Gardens support and how-to guidance provided by Acquia support with paid subscription
- 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.