In the last Drupal Gardens survey of site builders, the #1 requested item was image galleries.  We wanted Drupal Gardens' galleries to be built on Drupal 7's new files and fields architecture, and developed using the powerful media and styles modules. Read full article »

In addition to the rush the Drupal Gardens team gets when adding cool new features, we like to get things right, striking a good balance between power and simplicity.  In the last sprint, we spent a bunch of time polishing the powerful XML Sitemap and Media modules with a focus on simplifying the UX and providing smart defaults so they work immediately after site creation.  Out of the box, these modules are highly customizable with many configuration settings.  Our goal was to red Read full article »

When we started planning Drupal Gardens 18 months ago one of our goals was to help break down the barriers to creating stunning Drupal web sites. To that end we developed the Drupal Gardens' ThemeBuilder -- to allow people to point and click to create uniquely designed web sites, even if they don't know what CSS is or don't have the time to learn Drupal 7's powerful theme system. Read full article »

Yesterday we completed our pre-DrupalCon sprint and are excited to introduce several great new features, with a special focus on designers and site creators who need an awesome looking site. Specifically in this release we have added great support for professional fonts. As designers know, font selection is one key area where average web sites are separated from remarkable sites. In the past, font options for web sites were limited or complex to implement: you could create your own images with embedded expensive licensed fonts, or you could purchase, install and embed fonts yourself. Read full article »

In Drupal Gardens 2 month update Chris wrote about a number of the improvements to Drupal Gardens in our last sprint. I want to focus on our solution for a system that now lets us perform Gardens site upgrades with only a couple minutes of maintenance (site offline) time per site when running database updates. The problem was made a little more difficult by the custom domain feature that was also going live, so each Drupal site (database) might be referenced by multiple sites directories. I describe here the solution we worked out, which involves using Drush, the (internal) Acquia Hosting APIs, and communication with the http://www.drupalgardens.com/ site so that each site in our multi-site installs could be seamlessly moved between two different versions of Drupal 7. Read full article »

Yesterday we completed our 3rd sprint since Drupal Gardens went into private beta at the end of January. Following our Scrum development process, the Acquia engineering teams commit to delivering new features and bug fixes in every 3 week sprint. Before each sprint the designers craft rough visuals or mock-ups of every major feature to be developed. Within each sprint new features are planned, developed, tested and documented and pushed live. Read full article »

Coming up on one year since joining the company, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the progress Acquia has made recently, and which I have watched first hand. If you’re a regular follower of our blog, you’ve been seeing this growth on a regular basis; seeing the traction we’ve been having in hot markets such as government, media and publishing not to mention following all the technology developments taking place with our team and amongst the broader Drupal community. Read full article »

In these early days of the Drupal Gardens beta, we are adding new features, beta testers, and cloud servers around the clock. Since our last update 3 weeks ago, thousands more beta testers have been added, and they have clicked to create thousands of new Drupal Gardens web sites. And of course, being a social platform, those sites in turn are attracting their own communities. It's a lot of fun watching the garden grow. Read full article »