Acquia Offers Sneak Peek of Drupal Gardens at Drupalcon Paris 2009

Going from Design to Online with Drupal Has Never Been Easier

• Press Release
• Source: Acquia
• On 10:00 am EDT, Wednesday September 2, 2009

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Acquia, the enterprise guide to social publishing, today gave attendees at Drupalcon Paris 2009 their first look at Drupal Gardens. Previously code-named Acquia Gardens, Drupal Gardens is Acquia’s anticipated software-as-a-service version of Drupal that speeds the design and deployment of Drupal social publishing sites for new, non-technical users including small business owners and web designers.

Built on Drupal 7, Drupal Gardens is a completely hosted web service that includes design tools enabling anyone to build a beautiful Drupal site directly in a browser without requiring any special technical skills. There’s no programming language to learn, no hosting environment to set up, and no code to write. Drupal Gardens lets small businesses as well as enterprise micro sites build powerful community-driven websites fast, and at a fraction of the cost of a traditional site.

“Drupal Gardens brings the power of Drupal to new legions of site owners, who are now able to bring sites from design to deployed online in a matter of hours,” said Tom Erickson, CEO of Acquia. “The ability to establish communities quickly is vital to businesses and government organizations as they evolve their brand management strategies or develop new interactive customer relationship programs.”

Drupal Gardens is the only website creation service to offer:

• Flexible configuration for custom designs. Simplicity does not have to mean cookie-cutter. Drupal Gardens provides tools like Theme Builder to help site owners build custom sites and give designers the ability to test and tailor designs to meet their brands’ and sites’ unique requirements without requiring extensive technical resources.
• Point-and-click simplicity. Taking advantage of the usability enhancements in Drupal 7, Drupal Gardens allows anyone to launch a powerful Drupal social publishing site with a few clicks, without requiring any programming skills.
• Streamlined content contribution. Drupal Gardens doesn’t limit content creation to those with administration access. From professional designers, to enterprise marketers, to small and medium-sized business owners and individual site owners, Drupal Gardens makes content creation – including custom content types, wikis, blogs, and user-generated content - accessible for all levels of technical know-how.
• Opportunity to Expand. Committed to flexibility and portability, Drupal Gardens site owners can easily extend their websites functionality at any time by taking advantage of complete site portability. This enables users to export both their entire site, including its design, to dedicated, customer hosting environments such as Acquia Hosting.

“Simplicity is at the heart of Drupal Gardens’ value proposition and its easy-to-use features such as the Theme Builder are a critical component,” said Dries Buytaert, CTO and Founder of Acquia. “Drupal Gardens will be a significant growth accelerator for the Drupal community overall, extending its reach to anyone who is looking for a beautiful web site to build thriving communities.”

Drupal Gardens, currently in Alpha phase, is scheduled to be released into beta in coming months with GA coming 1H 2010. To receive updates on beta availability and URL registration please visit http://drupalgardens.com.

About Acquia

Acquia helps organizations of all sizes build social publishing websites quickly, easily and with a lower total cost of ownership by leveraging Drupal, the open source social publishing platform that blends content and community. Our products, services and support enable companies to leverage the power, technical innovation and economic value of Drupal while simplifying the experience, removing the complexity and minimizing the risk. Please visit: http://acquia.com. Download Acquia Drupal, the completely free Drupal distribution, at http://acquia.com/downloads.

About Drupal

The Drupal social publishing system has been downloaded over two million times since its inception and powers more than 400,000 web sites globally. Drupal includes an enterprise class content management system and is used to deliver a wide variety of web applications including single or multi-user blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, e-commerce, and many more. Assisted by a thriving ecosystem of consultants and developers, a diverse set of organizations use Drupal, including SonyBMG, Warner Brothers Records, the New York Observer, Forbes, Disney, Intel, Harvard University, and Amnesty International. A huge community has grown up around Drupal, with thousands of active contributors to the open source technology. For more information, visit http://drupal.org.

PAN Communications
Kristin Conforti, 978-474-1900
acquia@pancomm.com