It's been 3 weeks since we launched the Drupal Gardens private beta and the response has been incredible. Hundreds of Drupal 7 sites have been created and we are getting lots of great feedback on both Drupal 7 and new features testers would like to see in Gardens. A huge thank you to those of you who have provided feedback, keep up the great work!

A few weeks ago as most of you know we launched the first private beta version of Drupal Gardens, a project we’ve been working on for the last year and what we hope will be a huge step in taking Drupal to the masses.

I have a pretty big update for you: we just launched Drupal Gardens into private beta. Since the first public Drupal Gardens demo at DrupalCon Paris, a lot of progress has been made. Today, we sent private beta invites to the first people that signed up to be beta testers, and if things go well, we'll send out a couple thousand more invitations over the next few weeks.

I am very excited to announce our first webinar for Drupal Gardens Beta. On Thursday, January 28th at 1 pm EST, Acquia will be demonstrating Drupal Gardens and walking through the major features of Gardens. Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal 7 designed for any organization wanting to build social sites easily and quickly, backed up by the power of Drupal. Building microsites for launching a new product, a campaign or event, or forming a community site has never been this easy in Drupal. Drupal Gardens highlights:

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You might have seen our plans for Drupal Gardens which will be a way to build a Drupal site very quickly. While you'll be able to build any kind of site you need on Drupal Gardens, we're spending a lot of time to make sure that we make it easy for people to build very social sites to promote campaigns, events, products, and businesses. And by social, we mean a site that encourages people to participate and that leverages other social networks.

We'll include a set of social features that most all sites need when we launch:

• Blogs
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Some of you may have seen the first Gardens video posted a couple of months ago that shows a pre-alpha version of Drupal Gardens. This new demo video shows you some of the new features we've added to give you more control over the design of your site theme. We want you to be able to design a site with a home page that looks different from interior pages. It's fine for a blog site to have the same layout on all pages, but other kinds of sites need a home page that looks different.