Three Cheers for Drupal Gardens!

In an attempt to jump on the blog bandwagon, I've created my first site in Drupal Gardens. Drupal Gardens - Acquia’s foray into the blogosphere - is targeted at your Average Joe. With limited admin controls and easy-to-use modules, Gardens trims away many of Drupal’s administrative features to provide users with a simplified version of the CMS.

I wanted my site to reflect my two passions: politics and baking. A blog would host my thoughts on recent political events, while a Recipes page would house my favourite creations. All recent posts would be syndicated to the Home page.

My first step was to change the default theme. I’m a fan of glossy, attractive sites, but I also lack the CSS knowledge necessary to create such results. The theme builder module allows any user to tweak the standard display settings and create a site that is more to their liking. I particularly liked this feature because it gives users a lot of flexibility with colours, backgrounds and fonts. If you’re a CSS ninja and customization is your thing then Gardens has you covered with an ‘Advanced’ tab that allows for element editing.

Generating content beyond this point is where I got stumped. I created a bunch of articles, but was unfamiliar with Views and how to display that content accordingly. Also, configuring Blocks to tabulate recent information was another issue I was confronted with. At this point, I looked up the Quick Start Guide under Help. I really should have accessed this document earlier. It was a step-by-step guide to creating and populating a Gardens site, written in non-technical language. There were also a host of video tutorials and a glossary of Drupal terms. These documents are very useful and I’d recommend any first-time Drupalers to check them out.

A cool feature of Drupal Gardens is the ability to duplicate site architecture. This allows for rapid duplication of a master site’s look and feel onto smaller prototypes. Ideally, though, Gardens is great if you need to set up a site for an event, a personal blog or another temporary site, quickly and easily. When you sign-up most features are enabled, and customization from there is simple enough.

I must admit that despite my initial confusion, the Gardens interface is a lot simpler than the default Drupal installation. Configuring Views and Blocks in a regular Drupal site would have taken me far longer had I not practised on my Gardens site first. The limited administrative menu focused my attention on the most important features within the site architecture and served as a good training experience. By using the same terminology and underlying features, I was able to familiarize myself with the structure of Drupal without diving into the deep end head-first.

Acquia is currently offering Drupal Gardens for free (across all tiers) for the rest of 2010, so there’s no better time to try it out for yourself!

P.S. In case you were curious, here's a link to my blog. I have not yet finished editing most posts, so please don't judge me or my cooking skills based on the content! Happy Gardening!