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Drupal Goes Hosted With Private Beta Launch of “Gardens”

13 points by mgrouchy 17y ago

rinich 17y ago
I really wish Drupal had a design team capable of making things as attractive as Wordpress.com. Why didn't they get one of the big Drupal graphic designers, like Acko, on this?
GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
Drupal hosting has been around for years hasn't it? Most shared hosting services seem to have one click installs.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  Yes. And such systems make the first click very easy. Unfortunately, the second and subsequent clicks remain notoriously difficult. Gardens is an attempt to address issues beyond that first click.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Best of luck. Especially when you're going to upgrade 2 or 3,000 sites to the next major release. Another big stumbling block I've noticed when hosting large numbers of drupal sites is that drupal uses a very large number of database tables (>50, sometimes >100) to accomplish relatively simple stuff causing big problems on the database servers. If you host only a single site 100 tables is no big deal but when you have large numbers of small sites this becomes a real bottleneck. I believe recent versions of drupal are a bit better behaved in this respect.
    - westbywest 17y ago
      The next major release of Drupal (7) has a fair number of improvements towards semi-automated maintenance and upgrades. Most of these leverage off a command line interface called drush. Also, Joomla, Drupal's closest analog, has a comparable number of DB tables per site. The problem is more likely with prevailing conventions in certain open-source CMS design, than with a particular CMS. Drupal at least lets you share strategic tables across multiple sites.
      - mikepurvis 17y ago
        "The problem is more likely with prevailing conventions in certain open-source CMS design, than with a particular CMS." This is my understanding of the issue. I had some experience with Joomla back when it was Mambo, and my impression was that a huge number of the tables represented metadata and configuration of various kinds. It seemed like there was an almost fetish-like desire for everything to be configurable from a web UI, and a very heavy price was paid for this flexibility in the backend. Compare this with a product like PunBB, where it is much more opinionated, and some aspects of the configuration can only be altered by editing key source files. For example, to add or remove emoticons from the bulletin board or edit the curse-word replacement list, you have to edit an array in a file somewhere. Which may seem like a pain, but the end result is that you save on a big complicated admin screen that will only get used once or twice per installation, and for every subsequent pageview, you're just pulling stuff in from a file rather than a DB table.
shabda 17y ago
http://www.drupalgardens.com/create-site http://www.drupalgardens.com/create-site Firefox 3.0 or higher required. Firefox version 3.0 or higher is required to use the Drupal Gardens beta. While support for other browsers is coming soon, for now Firefox provides the optimum Drupal Gardens experience. :(
- simonw 17y ago
  Not supporting WebKit (even for an alpha release) is pretty poor form.
  - mgrouchy 17y ago
    agreed, I have basically sworn off of firefox except when I need firebug(works better then the chromium version). Making me use firefox probably means I will never even try it out.
  - westbywest 17y ago
    Agreed, and I do Drupal development from time to time. Restricting common browsers like IE, Chrome, and Safari entirely is a great way to tell people to go away. Simply popping up a warning dialog staying your particular browser is not supported would probably be more effective, since then you could more casual visitors, and entice them enough to return with FF3 later.
- GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
  Ouch. That's a non-starter for me, forced as I am to spend my workday using only IE6.
  - warfangle 17y ago
    Ouch. I don't think I'd ever agree to work somewhere that disallowed other browsers. Even if I wasn't in the web development industry...

13 points by mgrouchy 17y ago

I really wish Drupal had a design team capable of making things as attractive as Wordpress.com. Why didn't they get one of the big Drupal graphic designers, like Acko, on this?

GiraffeNecktie 17y ago

Drupal hosting has been around for years hasn't it? Most shared hosting services seem to have one click installs.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
Yes. And such systems make the first click very easy. Unfortunately, the second and subsequent clicks remain notoriously difficult. Gardens is an attempt to address issues beyond that first click.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Best of luck. Especially when you're going to upgrade 2 or 3,000 sites to the next major release. Another big stumbling block I've noticed when hosting large numbers of drupal sites is that drupal uses a very large number of database tables (>50, sometimes >100) to accomplish relatively simple stuff causing big problems on the database servers. If you host only a single site 100 tables is no big deal but when you have large numbers of small sites this becomes a real bottleneck. I believe recent versions of drupal are a bit better behaved in this respect.
  - westbywest 17y ago
    The next major release of Drupal (7) has a fair number of improvements towards semi-automated maintenance and upgrades. Most of these leverage off a command line interface called drush. Also, Joomla, Drupal's closest analog, has a comparable number of DB tables per site. The problem is more likely with prevailing conventions in certain open-source CMS design, than with a particular CMS. Drupal at least lets you share strategic tables across multiple sites.
    - mikepurvis 17y ago
      "The problem is more likely with prevailing conventions in certain open-source CMS design, than with a particular CMS." This is my understanding of the issue. I had some experience with Joomla back when it was Mambo, and my impression was that a huge number of the tables represented metadata and configuration of various kinds. It seemed like there was an almost fetish-like desire for everything to be configurable from a web UI, and a very heavy price was paid for this flexibility in the backend. Compare this with a product like PunBB, where it is much more opinionated, and some aspects of the configuration can only be altered by editing key source files. For example, to add or remove emoticons from the bulletin board or edit the curse-word replacement list, you have to edit an array in a file somewhere. Which may seem like a pain, but the end result is that you save on a big complicated admin screen that will only get used once or twice per installation, and for every subsequent pageview, you're just pulling stuff in from a file rather than a DB table.

shabda 17y ago

http://www.drupalgardens.com/create-site http://www.drupalgardens.com/create-site Firefox 3.0 or higher required. Firefox version 3.0 or higher is required to use the Drupal Gardens beta. While support for other browsers is coming soon, for now Firefox provides the optimum Drupal Gardens experience. :(

simonw 17y ago
Not supporting WebKit (even for an alpha release) is pretty poor form.
- mgrouchy 17y ago
  agreed, I have basically sworn off of firefox except when I need firebug(works better then the chromium version). Making me use firefox probably means I will never even try it out.
- westbywest 17y ago
  Agreed, and I do Drupal development from time to time. Restricting common browsers like IE, Chrome, and Safari entirely is a great way to tell people to go away. Simply popping up a warning dialog staying your particular browser is not supported would probably be more effective, since then you could more casual visitors, and entice them enough to return with FF3 later.
GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
Ouch. That's a non-starter for me, forced as I am to spend my workday using only IE6.
- warfangle 17y ago
  Ouch. I don't think I'd ever agree to work somewhere that disallowed other browsers. Even if I wasn't in the web development industry...