drupalgardens

In the last Drupal Gardens survey of site builders, the #1 requested item was image galleries.  We wanted Drupal Gardens' galleries to be built on Drupal 7's new files and fields architecture, and developed using the powerful media and styles modules.

When we started planning Drupal Gardens 18 months ago one of our goals was to help break down the barriers to creating stunning Drupal web sites. To that end we developed the Drupal Gardens' ThemeBuilder -- to allow people to point and click to create uniquely designed web sites, even if they don't know what CSS is or don't have the time to learn Drupal 7's powerful theme system.

In Drupal Gardens 2 month update Chris wrote about a number of the improvements to Drupal Gardens in our last sprint. I want to focus on our solution for a system that now lets us perform Gardens site upgrades with only a couple minutes of maintenance (site offline) time per site when running database updates. The problem was made a little more difficult by the custom domain feature that was also going live, so each Drupal site (database) might be referenced by multiple sites directories. I describe here the solution we worked out, which involves using Drush, the (internal) Acquia Hosting APIs, and communication with the http://www.drupalgardens.com/ site so that each site in our multi-site installs could be seamlessly moved between two different versions of Drupal 7.

Coming up on one year since joining the company, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on the progress Acquia has made recently, and which I have watched first hand. If you’re a regular follower of our blog, you’ve been seeing this growth on a regular basis; seeing the traction we’ve been having in hot markets such as government, media and publishing not to mention following all the technology developments taking place with our team and amongst the broader Drupal community.