Hosted Version of the Drupal CMS is Taking Shape

Acquia, which provides commercial support for and its own distribution of the Drupal content management system (CMS,) is moving ahead with its new effort 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. As Savio Rodrigues notes, the project is coming along well, and there is a good online demo.

You can find the online demo of Drupal Gardens here.  According to Rodrigues' post, which reports on a converstation he had with Drupal founder and Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert, we'll see Drupal Gardens in the first half of 2010.

As a hosted version of one of the most popular open source content management systems, Drupal Gardens promises to speed up how quickly content owners can produce useful sites, and more.  Many newspapers and other types of sites are switching to Drupal, and a cloud-based Drupal service could also help facilitate workers contributing content from distributed remote locations. According to Rodrigues' post, Dries Buytaert refers to the project's promise as "design to online in hours."