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.

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.

As reported by CMSWire last week, there will soon be a SaaS (Software as a Service) version of Drupal, the popular and extremely extendable content management system. Drupal Gardens will be offered by Acquia, a commercial arm of the open source platform.

Drupal Gardens could have quite an impact. Many organizations and companies would benefit from using Drupal as their Web site platform. While installation of Drupal is quite easy (similar to WordPress and Joomla), customization and configuration to meet specific needs requires a steeper learning curve. If this new SaaS version can simplify life for many users, while retaining a good share of the extendability, Drupal may grow even faster than it does now.

I do have one quibble with the writer of the article, however. He states:

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?

Er, SaaS for Joomla DOES exist, in at least one place. SimplWeb has been providing a fully hosted and supported Joomla environment for at least a year now.