Earlier this year, we launched Drupal Gardens in private beta here at Acquia. A couple of days ago, we hit the 10,000 site mark! I want to thank all the people that that continue to help test Drupal Gardens, and whom created 10,000 new Drupal Gardens sites in such a record time. It is great to see more and more people build real sites on Drupal Gardens, and to see the platform that once was only envisioned, come to life.

We decided to build Drupal Gardens because we believed that many individuals and organizations want a killer web site, but have no idea that Drupal is a great way to build one. Even if they did hear about Drupal, few non-technical people succeed in installing a Drupal site, creating a nice-looking theme for it, and keeping Drupal up-to-date. We also learned that there are plenty of organizations that maintain tens, and even hundreds of micro sites and that Drupal Gardens has real promise in the enterprise. Our goal is to make Drupal Gardens a good fit for all of these audiences.

Talking to Drupal Gardens users, and reading people's reactions on Twitter, I'm convinced Drupal Gardens can be the game changer that we envisioned it to be. It's frickin' exciting!

Now we've passed 10,000 sites, our goal is to work towards an open beta, rather than a private invite-only beta. This means that over the next couple of months, you'll see us focus more on fixing bugs and fine-tuning so we can open our doors for more people. Of course, we'll continue to add new functionality too. A lot of big new features are already in the design and planning phase, but more about our plans in a future post.