Acquia, which
provides commercial support for and its own distribution of the Drupal content management system (CMS), today gave attendees at Drupalcon Paris 2009
a first look at
Drupal Gardens. The project had been previously code-named Acquia Gardens, and is the company's upcoming software-as-a-service version of Drupal designed to speed the design and deployment of Drupal social publishing sites for non-technical users including small business owners and web designers. It looks like it could help extend Drupal out to many new users who might shy away from installing and learning Drupal from the ground up, and help Drupal compete with hosted publishing platforms.