Building social Web sites

Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal, has announced the general availability of Drupal Gardens 1.0. Views, a capability unique to Drupal, provides Drupal Gardens with a wide collection of tools for site builders with the simplicity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery.

Without writing any code, Views makes it possible to create custom mashups or combinations of content, media, user profiles and more. Site builders can point and click to pull together any information on their site and craft dynamic lists, grids, tables, reports, RSS feeds and navigation. Views can also be configured to display different results based on visitor interactions, such as displaying posts submitted over the past month vs. the most popular. With Views, Drupal Gardens’ sites can be easily assembled and deployed with completely custom dynamic content.

Importantly, there is no lock-in for site builders and owners with Drupal Gardens’ open SaaS approach. If there is a need to add custom modules, the complete site — theme, code and data — can be exported to Dev Cloud, Acquia’s self-service cloud hosting platform for professional developers.