- 5 Things to Consider when Integrating your Content Management System and Portal
(6 comments) - Is Microsoft's New Windows Phone 7 Smartphone Competition for iPhone?
- CMS Review: Oracle Universal Content Management (UCM)
- Installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7
(5 comments) - Sun Microsystems Chief Open Source Officer Leaves Oracle
- Google's Marketplace Spells Trouble for Microsoft
(5 comments) - #SXSW: R.I.P Content Management System
(5 comments)
Get the NewsletterSaaS Drupal Service 'Drupal Gardens' Moves Towards Launch
Drupal Gardens, originally labeled Acquia Gardens, has been one of the hot issues at this year's European DrupalCon in Paris. Gardens is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of the highly popular Drupal web content management system.
We sat down with Tom Erickson, Acquia's CEO, to discuss the Gardens project, the Drupal Theme Builder, Drupal 7 and Acquia's pathways to profitability. Here's what we learned.
A Gander at the Gardens
The Drupal Gardens product is very important to Acquia and very important to the Drupal community. This is what Tom asserts, and we believe him. Gardens is one of 3 revenue generating paths for Acquia. The other 2 are the Acquia Network (Drupal support and search services) and their recently announced Acquia Hosting.
Acquia's Drupal-based Business Model
It's widely know that Drupal has a steep learning curve. The Gardens project is designed to address this hurdle to Drupal adoption, as well as deliver a quick micro-site development platform, which Tom says is in high demand by enterprise customers as well as government and non-governmental organizations.
The goal in short is to become the WordPress.com of the Web Content Management space. This will be good for Acquia and most likely good for the Drupal community as a whole.
Based in Amazon's Cloud
Gardens is going to be based on Amazon Web Services, complimented by a special file system which Acquia has developed using some third party technologies. The system is approximately multi-tenant, but strictly speaking it is not a pure multi-tenant system, and higher-end clients may have their own instances.
Not Acquia Drupal, Not Drupal 7, Not all GPL
The Drupal that powers Gardens is not going to be the same Drupal that ships in the Acquia Drupal builds. There will of course be similarities, but most likely there will be more restrictions on what makes it into Gardens. Tom did state that security patches would make it into both release at approximately the same time.
Gardens is based on Drupal 7 but is not exactly Drupal 7. So much of the work that Acquia staff are putting in now, will be enjoyed by the greater Drupal community. This point is sure to win them some good will.
[Editor's Note: The Drupal 7 project is coming along nicely, but has seen a recent slip with the official code freeze date.]
One fact that may not win as many smiles is that some of the technology used in Drupal Gardens will not be released as GPL and will not make it into the community. From what Tom told us today, the new Theme Builder is in that category — it's a proprietary piece of technology that for the moment is for Acquia only.
Acquia's Theme Builder for Drupal Gardens
Quick to Build With, Robust, Cheap, Scalable and Portable
I can clearly see the market for a solution like Drupal Gardens. Drupal is a powerful framework with an exceptional community of contributers, consultants and general knowledge. Making such a resource more broadly accessible in a profitable way strikes one as a no brainer. The fact that the founder of the Drupal project and the founder of Acquia are the same person seems rather helpful too.
Blogging platforms like WordPress.com and Blogger.com are hugely popular and you can bend and twist them into being web content management systems, but don't kid yourself, they are not in the same game as a system like Drupal.
Something like Drupal Gardens simply does not exist today. And I think there is a need for it.
Quick to Build With
This remains to be seen. It's the challenge that Acquia has before it. Will they succeed? We will have to see. I'd keep expectations low for the first few versions.
But there's no doubt that Drupal 7 is an ambitious release in terms that include usability. Lots of work has happened deep in core, specifically around Fields. But much of the D7 project has also been focused on usability — making the product more accessible to the general public.
The Drupal Gardens project is benefiting from (and perhaps steering?) this. As both Drupal and the Acquia offering mature, the Quick to Build With promise is likely to become fairly true.
Acquia's Theme Builder will be an important part of making the product more accessible to the public. And their plans to offer ready-made themes to chose from will be welcomed. We also spoke a bit about a theme marketplace and Tom indicated that Acquia were not opposed to the idea of non-GPL themes.
Robust
Drupal is a robust and extensible framework. I didn't say perfect. Yes, it has its flaws, but the way you can stretch and bend the software is impressive. The amount of tweaking you can do in the Gardens environment will be limited of course. But a useful set of modules will be there and with native content type extensibility, the basics already provide a healthy number of pathways for growth and customization.
I'm sure the first few releases will disappoint the outliers, but for 60-80% of you, the features will likely be pleasing. Do keep in mind that the basic Drupal Gardens services will not allow you to add your own modules.
Cheap
Dries has said that there will be a free version of Drupal Gardesn. As usual, there may be some ads to cover costs and there will be tiers as you step up in website size, bandwidth or features. Pricing is not finalized, but the starting point is supposed to be around US$ 20 per month. That's pretty cheap.
Scalable
There's not a lot to say here. Gardens is being built on Amazon's cloud. As we know, the cloud is not infallible, but it does tend to be scalable. How pricing will scale is a different story. But that brings us to the last point.
Portable
This was something that Tom put quite a lot of emphasis on — the idea that anything you do with Gardens is portable either to Acquia Hosting or to your own infrastructure. The output of Acquia's Theme Builder is also meant to be portable.
The point was that you can start and grow with Gardens, but there is no lock-in. You are free to export your content, themes, etc and move over to Acquia Hosting (of course!) or to your own infrastructure.
The Market
Acquia is focused on 3 segments with Gardens:
- The broad market — free, highly functional websites for anyone
- The SMB market — real but cheap WCM for small business starting at around $20 per month
- Enterprise/Government/NGO — quick micro-sites and "disposable" sites service which can be up-sold to other Drupal Gardens tiers and other Acquia products
The Road Ahead
Acquia's Drupal Gardens are unseasonably in bud. Tom said that the early alpha release — the friends and family type — would be rolling out in about a month. Gardens is tied closely to Drupal 7 and the dates we expect for that are quite a ways off now.
Hazarding a guess, it looks like the first beta releases of Drupal 7 will not arrive until early 2010. The production release might not go out until late Spring 2010.
But Gardens will be less than Drupal 7 and as such it's possible that a version of Drupal Gardens running on Drupal 7 could beat the main D7 out the gate. This strikes me as possibly a good thing for all involved — Acquia will get tons of attention as people rush to see Drupal 7 and the Drupal 7 project will benefit from both the planned and unplanned QA of Acquia and its customers.
Where Art Thou Fair Joomla?
If you look at the open source web content management market, there are 3 dominant products: Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. These three packages are not terribly similar, but they do compete heavily in the lower end of the market. Wordpress.com exists. DrupalGardens.com exists. And dear Joomla, when shall we expect you to join us?
Was this article useful?
Email It
Stumble It
Add RSS6 Reader Comments
Leave a Response
Processing...
Job Openings View all
| Post a job
| 
RSS
- New Media Manager (Social Media) at Citrix Online
- Web Graphic Artist at Cross Commerce Media
- Copywriter at Laserfiche
- Director of Mobile Applications at Barnes and Noble
- Senior IA / UX Designer at Fox Mobile Group
- Analyst, Serving Customer Intelligence Professionals at Forrester Research
- Senior Sales Rep at Clickability
- Project Manager/Digital Media at TMG
Featured Events View all
| Add event
| RSS
- Apr 21, 2010 – Drupalcon San Francisco 2010
- Apr 22, 2010 – AIIM International Expo 2010
- May 5, 2010 – CMS Expo 2010 (Evanston)
- May 6, 2010 – J Boye Philadelphia 2010
- May 20, 2010 – Gilbane Conference San Francisco
Brice - Why is the Theme Builder's licensing an issue?
Assuming the Theme Builder is actually an extension to Drupal (Is it?), it is provided as a Web service which is not distribution under the GPL. For that reason, the software would not have to be distributed, nor would it require same term licensing.
Most software like this is developed for administrative, not product purposes, and written to wire into specific software interfaces used to manage the company's business. It is typically not developed for broad use since doing so has cost.
Obviously, the people behind this company are huge contributors in the Drupal community. I would hate to think that readers might incorrectly assume wrong doing that, to be honest, seems to insinuated by this article.
Am I missing something, Brice? What concerns do you have?
Hi Amy,
I only said that this "may not win as many smiles".
I already have encountered some expectation that Theme Builder will be released as GPL to the community, which is not the case according to Tom.
It is also my understanding that Theme Builder is not a Drupal add-on (specifically it is not a core or contrib module). I could be wrong on that point, but that was my understanding.
Just to be clear, I am not saying "should", or "have to" or anything like that. And I don't really have any concerns either way. I just think the community would love to have Theme Builder (e.g., in the form of a module) and the way things apparently are today, they can't.
Want + Can't != Smile
Well, to be fair, the article also has phrases like 'not all GPL' and 'restrictions', etc., which, in sum, might paint the wrong picture.
You are absolutely right in that some "in the community" would love to have everything - code, support, documentation, my new car - free of charge.
Heck - I've had people call my home insisting I help them because I volunteer and they need help! But, it's not news to say I don't want to take those calls. It's a lack of understanding some have of the license and free software communities. That's why I hate to see reputable media articles fanning that flame - especially before any objections are raised. We have enough trouble with unreasonable expectation! lol!
Regarding your Joomla! question, when I look into my crystal ball, I don't see a comparable service from a key contributor soon. The Joomla! GPL ecosystem is very, very young and not nearly as advanced as Drupal or WordPress.
I'd love to be wrong about that, though, and I hope one day we will see Joomla! contributors with similar services and businesses. Stories like this make my heart soar. Drupal will be 9 in January. It's about time these contributors start to benefit from what they have made possible for so many.
Thanks for all you do covering free software CMS's, Brice. Thanks, also, for taking time to respond to my concerns.
Joomla is maturing and the array of associated services is growing very quickly. At Jentla, we are gaining traction fast and will soon be announcing some quite large multisite implementations.
In contrast to Drupal, Joomla is already extremely easy for new people to CMS to implement, making the need for an equivalent service to Drupal Gardens in the Joomla space less relevant.
Joomla is already an integral part of so many hosting companies offerings. Joomla dominates the space Drupal Gardens is hoping to reach into and will continue to do so. It is just easier to learn and use.
In my opinion, the challenge for Joomla is at the other end of the market, to confidently offer business friendly features like admin ACLs (soon to be in Joomla 1.6), version control and content workflows.
Joomla is starting to assert itself with enterprise friendly providers like Jentla and well into the SME space with offerings like the soon to be released JOORABLE! distros for a range of vertical markets.
Hey!
This is Alex from Acquia...we're also looking for alpha testers. If you'd like to help us, shoot me an email alex.lindahl@acquia.com
I'd also be happy to answer any questions about Drupal Gardens, our plans, Drupal hosting, etc.
Cheers!
Good points, Damian. There are commercial entities which offer hosted solutions but to the best of my knowledge, there is no free of charge WordPress.com-like resource for Joomla! yet, and I personally have not heard of one in the works.
Another concern I have that I think must turn around soon is that Joomla!'s primary project contributors are buried by the project and have not had time to build a healthy commercial momentum, certainly not with hosted services. The community does not have the levels of broad involvement that enable lead developers to focus on their businesses to the extent that will be needed. I hope that turns around because it's not sustainable unless contributors have solid businesses, too. (Or, are paid a salary, I guess.) In part, that's why what Acquia is doing encourages me.
Agree completely on Joomla!'s need to come to speed with the enterprise features, some of which will be addressed in 1.6. The other items on your list are identified for the quick release 1.7, 1.8, etc., on the road to 2.0. Lots to do.