Acquia tries to mainstream Drupal with Drupal Gardens

Acquia announced recently they were releasing a new tool called Drupal Gardens that makes it easier to create websites using the popular open source Drupal platform. In a recent blog post Acquia VP of Marketing, Lynne Capozzi wrote about how, rightly or wrongly, some people are intimidated by the idea of building a website using a tool like Drupal.

It's great for the power users who can build an understanding of how site building in Drupal works, but Drupal Gardens puts this in the hands of less technical end users. It provides an easy path to creating the site, then choosing a theme (either provided or one you create on your own), color schemes, fonts and so forth.

Of course, you can control all of these elements in the Drupal design process regardless of whether you are using a front-end tool or not, but Drupal Gardens makes it relatively easy to build sites and choose site elements within a framework. Acquia believes giving users this flexibility will make it more likely that companies will choose Drupal.

Capozzi says that it will also help companies build marketing campaigns much more quickly:

"There are so many applications of Drupal Gardens I'm anxious to see incorporated into marketing campaigns, but one I believe will really excite my fellow marketers is the ability to quickly and easily create slick, feature-rich microsites for a campaign. Marketers are focused on building targeted audiences and social communities and so many of them see microsites as the primary launching pad for brand and loyalty building."

We will see how well this tool works for this purpose, but it does clearly put Drupal site design within reach of a much broader set of users. The product is currently in private beta.

For more information:
- see Capozzi's blog post

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