Drupal Gardens has moved into private beta, so private that I haven’t been lucky enough to get in the door yet.  But this new, hosted CMS, built on the forthcoming Drupal version 7, promises to be an interesting alternative for sites needing rapid deployment and a strong set of user-friendly features.

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert announced the launch on his blog, noting,

Drupal Gardens is a hosted version of Drupal so you don’t have to worry about installation, hosting or upgrading. Think of it as WordPress.com or Ning, except that it comes with the power of Drupal. Equipped with multi-user blogging, commenting, forums, custom content types, and advanced user management, Drupal Gardens should be a great tool for organizations that want to build social sites.

A post over at Contented Management provides a helpful, early review of this new Drupal service. I’m looking forward to the chance to give it a test run – should come late winter or early spring.

I’ve taken part in many Web site redesigns, including a LOT of newspaper site remakes, and the process is often akin to making sausage.  Yesterday I read a post on the subject from Steve Yelvington, and now I’ve got a primer to print out and distribute before my next “group redesign” of a newspaper site.  It’ll be required reading for any participants, and I’ll even have a pop quiz on it before that very first committee meeting.

Yelvington describes how groups, often hindered by unclear roles and misplaced skillsets, twist themselves up into the minutiae of design at the expense of usability discussions.  Worse, the conversation hovers over one element of the site, which he notes with proper sarcasm:

All of this happens around a consideration of just one page — the home page, the Web’s equivalent of the holy Front Page, the focus of all power and glory in any newsroom.

Yes, the home page needs attention in any redesign, but most often it gets all of the attention.  With search, feeds, and viral links now a common way for people to enter your site ‘through the side door,’ focus on the home page need not be excessive.

I may go a step further and require that my newspaper site redesign committees ignore the home page until interior-page content is fully addressed. …Well, okay, maybe best to just start with the pop quiz and then play it by ear.

Here’s a solid piece from Smashing Magazine – Getting Started With Content Management Systems. If your existing Web site is hard to keep organized, or perennially incomplete because every little addition has to wait for your Web designer, then this is a good primer on moving to that next step.

There is no set list of requirements for a content management system because each organization has unique needs. Keep your requirements to a minimum, but be sure to allow for the future growth and demands of your company. Enlisting the help of a Web design and development company to assess your needs is a good idea.

Good advice. Also, in the reader comments below the Smashing article, you’ll find developers/designers who understand the unique needs and unique advantages of  specific sites against specific content systems.  And you’ll also see those who are certain that their preferred CMS is the only real solution, while the other options are crap.  Avoid this latter group.  There are no blanket answers when it comes to CMS, and the landscape changes by the week. Anyone suggesting otherwise lacks both experience and expertise.

News out the other day is that WhiteHouse.gov is now running under the Drupal framework.  Here’s Tim O’Reilly’s evaluation of the significance.  As noted, it’s a benchmark moment for Drupal, and for all open source content systems and software.  There are still folks out there who would suggest that ‘free’ CMS solutions such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are beneath the effort and investment required for ‘enterprise-level’ content. Well, you can’t really get more enterprise than the executive arm of the United States of America. So there’s that.

Possibly rising as a solid open source e-commerce option, Spree recently released at version 0.9.0.  Spree utilizes Ruby on Rails, a framework optimized for rapid development and flexibility.

Commerce platforms are a niche all their own. While broader content systems can certainly integrate commerce, with shopping carts, payment gateways and other plugins, all too often the result is decidedly piecemeal.  If the focus of your site or project is all about a good shopping experience for your online customer, then going with a dedicated e-commerce system might well be the better ticket.

This can come at a price though. For some time I’ve been watching Magento, another e-commerce platform that runs on the more traditional PHP/MySQL structure.  Magento is open source as well, but the fully supported Enterprise Edition needs a minimum of about $10k per year to license and that doesn’t include server needs.

That might be a great deal for businesses who can gain ROI in a short time with a lot of online orders, especially considering the high price tag of other commercial solutions. For others, the decision might come down to a gamble that straight-up implementation under the open source version is worth a try.

And like so much else, the choice comes down to evaluating complexity of your intended application and the speed with which you need to go to market.

Ning, a fast-rising platform for social networks, grabbed a share of news last week by officially launching its Ning Apps service. Ning allows individuals to quickly and freely set up their own social networks on any topic, and has grown from some half a million networks when it first hit my radar about a year ago, to more than three times that many today.

Ning competes with Facebook in theory, but while Facebook, MySpace, and same are built around your personal profile – which is supplemented by friends and groups – Ning is all about niche groups.

This can be ideal for groups that want easy and versatile participation from all its members. Just a few years ago, setting up a site with Ning’s capabilities would have required lots of money and lots of time, a system well out of reach for most.

The tricky side of Ning (and for that matter, many social networky things that reside in the cloud), is that the data accrued in your social network is not easily obtainable by you, if you should ever need to take it elsewhere. And of course, you and your network members are subject to whatever user agreement Ning provides.

In most cases, the benefits of using Ning far outweigh these details. A neighborhood group, a small volunteer organization, devotees of a particular and unusual topic – all these and many more would be hard pressed to find an easier solution for communicating online.

But the introduction of Ning Apps further emphasizes the hazard (perceived or no) at play. Before a Ning network creator can install and make use of any 3rd-party application, you must clear this screen:

By adding this Ning App to your social network you are agreeing to share your information as well as the information of the members of your social network with the third party who developed it.

So whether your Ning network has 3 members or 3,000, you alone make the call on whether outfits such as Hulu, Ticketmaster, and PollDaddy gain access to the information in all your network’s profiles.

Facebook apps carry similar baggage, of course, but it’s easier to make decisions about personal data when the data is yours alone. The early press on Ning Apps doesn’t seem concerned about such matters, perhaps because Ning Apps disclosure isn’t particularly different from Ning itself. But I’ve noticed that fear and/or acceptance regarding online privacy varies widely. When developing social media applications or just catching the wind with a big sail like Ning, it’s best to remain thoughtful on those kinds of concerns.