Drupalcon Paris gave us a chance to talk to a lot of people about Drupal Gardens and it was interesting to hear the different ways that people want to use it. Many developers are glad they'll have a Drupal option for clients who are too small to take on, so they can stop sending them to services like Squarespace and Ning. Several people asked us about being able to create a site template that they could reuse for multiple clients who had the same needs (eg. a template site for organic farmers). This is great idea and we added it to our backlog. Some people see Gardens as a great tool for prototyping sites quickly for clients. They would keep some of their clients on Gardens and would export the site off of Gardens for other clients. We also had requests for a "white label" version of Drupal Gardens so a partner could offer custom functionality.

One of the things we're trying to do is to make Drupal Gardens into a service that helps Drupal newbies build sites, while at the same time is useful to experienced Drupal developers and designers. Hearing all the different ways that people want to use it makes me think that we're on the right track. The end result should be a lot more Drupal sites out there.

If you haven't seen Gardens yet, here's a screencast.
If you think of other ways you would want to use Gardens, let us know. Thanks