Hosted Drupal CMS planned for midyear

18.03.2010
Acquia hopes to make a hosted version of its Drupal open-source content management system widely available in about three months, the company's CTO said Wednesday.

The service, called , is in beta testing now with a "couple of thousand" users, said Dries Buytaert, who created Drupal and cofounded Acquia to build a commercial business around it. The service will be based on Drupal 7, an upgrade to the CMS software that will be released at about the same time, Buytaert said at the in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Drupal is a software platform for publishing Web sites and managing text, images and other content on those sites. It has been used by individuals to publish blogs and by larger organizations, including the White House and NASA, to run their Web sites.

But Drupal has also faced criticism for not being as easy to use as some other Web publishing systems, notably Wordpress. "Drupal has a lot of add-on modules that make it extremely powerful, so you can do a lot with it, but it can take a lot of work," said Brice Dunwoodie, publisher of , a Web site that covers the content management industry.

Drupal 7 and Drupal Gardens will come bundled with a number of commonly used add-on modules to create a base package that has more capabilities to begin with, so users don't have to add them themselves. It will also have a revamped Web site management interface that is designed to be easier to use.

"One key pitch for Drupal Gardens is that it's going to help grab some of the low- and midend market back from the likes of Wordpress and Joomla," Dunwoodie said.