Drupal Gardens

» see drupalgardens.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

drupal gardens was for small businesses that wanted a drupal site without ever hiring a drupal developer. i was not running a small business in 2010, and the people i knew who were building turkish company sites were on joomla or wordpress, not on a US-hosted drupal saas with a $30 a month price point. so i never had a drupal gardens site. but the product was real, and at peak it had over a hundred thousand of them.

acquia announced gardens in october 2009 at the boston drupalcon. the company had been founded in 2007 by dries buytaert (drupal's original author) and jay batson to commercialize drupal hosting. gardens was the second product, aimed at the long tail of small sites that did not need acquia's enterprise drupal hosting tier. the public beta opened in early 2010. by 2013 the platform was running well over a hundred thousand sites.

then acquia decided to stop building it. the company's center of gravity shifted toward acquia cloud site factory, the multi-site enterprise drupal product that ran governments and the marriott marketing org. gardens, by contrast, was a saas with thousands of $30 customers and no obvious path to enterprise revenue. the shutdown was announced in early 2016 and ran on 1 august 2016. dries buytaert later wrote that closing drupal gardens was the biggest regret of his working life.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

at launch the pitch was strong. gardens was the only way to spin up a real drupal 7 site without renting a vps and running drush yourself. for nonprofit and small-business users this was a meaningful improvement over the old “download the tarball and good luck” default. the theme picker was decent and the editor was decent. it worked.

the problem was that wordpress.com was doing the same job for less money with a friendlier editor, and squarespace was doing it with much nicer themes. drupal gardens was caught between a more flexible self-hosted option below and a much easier-to-use SaaS above. the people in the middle who actually wanted a hosted drupal turned out to be a small market.

~ what it became ~

acquia recommended bluehost as a migration target. the platform did make the site export easy. you could pull a full drupal 7 tarball and database dump and move it almost anywhere that ran php. many of the hundred thousand sites did exactly that and stayed on drupal 7 for years longer than they should have, since the drupal 7 to drupal 8 upgrade path was famously brutal. drupal 7 itself only reached end of life in january 2025, sixteen years after release, partly because nobody who had inherited a drupal gardens migration wanted to redo the whole thing.

buytaert's stated regret on linkedin in 2025 was specifically that gardens proved the demand for hosted drupal at the small-business tier, and that killing it left that demand for wordpress to absorb. the eventual successor inside acquia is something called acquia source, announced 2024 as a hosted drupal cms experience aimed at exactly the audience drupal gardens had served. nine years later.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »