Using Drupal has suddenly become much easier. Acquia has just released into (private) Beta Drupal Gardens. We've been working on Drupal Gardens for over a year, teaming our expert Drupalers with our crack infrastructure / hosting experts, to provide Drupal 7 as a hosted service. We've included tons of usability improvements, and contributed the vast majority of them back to the open source project.

In installment one of this Debunking Drupal Myths series, I mentioned that the proprietary software companies who are starting to see Drupal on their competitive screen are worried. They're using the classic FUD technique -- trying to raise Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about Drupal's capabilities. And so I started this series to start to debunk the FUD. Our first case dealt with Content Control.

Acquia has quickly become successful in increasing the exposure of Drupal to "CTO-level" conversations at larger enterprises. Despite the fact that there are numerous examples of big companies using it, Drupal is really still pretty unknown in big organizations - at least when you compare it to commercial, closed-source content management systems (the "incumbents").

As Drupal starts to make inroads in these larger organizations, the incumbents are forced to defend why their expensive proprietary software is better than that "little Drupal project." Hooray! The mere fact that they now must have answers shows that Drupal isn't such a little project anymore, and it is starting to cause real pain to the incumbents. It's now only a matter of time: high quality, powerful open source software with a big community behind it is the biggest threat to any closed-source software. The incumbents are living on borrowed time.

But given that we're now impacting them competitively, we're all about to experience an increasing flow of venomous-sounding FUD coming from these incumbents.

Dries & I (well, let's just say "Acquia") are doing a little research and we want you guys to be a part of it. We're looking down the road and evaluating a variety of new things to add to our product offerings. We're interested in your feedback because we want to be sure build what you actually want, vs. what we imagine you want.

So help us get it right by taking our little survey. You should be able to complete it in under 5 minutes.

Now as much as we'd like to think you'd do this because you love Dries, Drupal & Acquia, I'm sure more of you will talk to us if we give away some loot. So as a bonus for taking the survey, you can choose to enter our contest where one lucky duck will receive for FREE their choice of either of two award prizes:

It is so amazing to have a great, global community of passionate Drupalists. It usually means that you can quickly find people who are of like mind that want to help the Drupal world grow in ways that are new, unique, and useful. Today is no exception: I'm happy to say that Jeff Burns and Acquia have partnered to merge his 3rd World Themes project into Acquia's design-oriented microsite design.acquia.com.

This weekend, 150+ people assembled at the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge for the first-ever Design4Drupal Camp. This was unique in that a large majority of the attendees were deeply involved in design - not just coding modules. While some of the usual suspects were there, many designers were meeting each other for the first time.

I'm happy to have seen the good response to my "What shall we do about themes?" post. I'm particularly glad to see a bunch of self-described designers participating, and to see the thoughtfulness of the comments.

From the 50+ comments, a few consistent messages emerged (no editorial pen here; just consolidating / summarizing):

Today in the Boston Globe there's an article in the business section about Acquia. It's gratifying to see our company start to get visibility outside the close-knit Drupal community. I just wanted to take a moment to expand on it a bit.

For almost as long as I've been involved with Drupal, there's been a running complaint – either a (false) perception or (true) reality – that Drupal is "theme-challenged" compared to alternatives like Joomla and WordPress. I had this complaint myself when I first started using Drupal. Our investors heard it during their due-diligence on Drupal. And I continue to hear it from people I meet who are building their first Drupal site.

Acquia isn't my first company; I've constructed a few before. In fact, bringing well-suited people together to achieve something together is one of those things that (I think) I just naturally do. I've done it over and over in life. Maybe it comes from my dad being a guy who was always pushing the envelope when it came to things like health foods for long life, etc., and then trying to convince others to do likewise.