Posted on 03.15.11

Rapid Site Design with Joy Burke and Drupal Gardens

by Steven Zeisler

Drupal Gardens' hosted web service offers a great way for designers to get up and running quickly with a Drupal website. Art Director Joy Burke shares the pros and cons of working with this new tool from the fine folks at Acquia.

Joy is building a website with Drupal Gardens for the first time. A hosted solution for rapid creation of Drupal-based websites, Drupal Gardens offers a wealth of features that streamline development time for creating page layouts, adding image galleries, and theming on the fly. It also offers Typekit integration, which allows for great web typography customization. Joy has found that Drupal Gardens simplifies the design process while also throwing in some restrictions as well. Here’s Joy’s take on the Drupal Gardens workflow as well as some tips for getting it up and running quickly.

Q: What are some set-up options that Drupal Gardens provides?

Joy: Here is a list to consider:

• Know all your content before diving into Drupal Gardens so you can easily toggle the appropriate on/off switches during setup and configuration. If you have built out the information architecture and wireframes prior to setting up your site you should have a pretty good idea what you’ll need.

Customizable admin features / pages / blocks page in Drupal Gardens
• Design first, then implement…have an idea of how you want the site to look before making changes to the appearance in Drupal Gardens.
• Drupal Gardens offers hosting, but you can also export a Drupal 7 site at any time. Buy your URL in advance. You can resolve it to the Drupal Gardens server or export and host on your own server if you’d like.
• And finally, practicing with Drupal Gardens will give you a pretty good idea what its strength and limitations are. I spent several afternoon setting up prototypes just to get an idea what I could and couldn’t do with the product.

Q: Why Drupal Gardens?

Joy: One of Drupal Gardens’ biggest advantages is being able to skip the steps of figuring out hosting and databases because there’s nothing to install and no servers to manage. They take care of everything on the back-end so I can focus on the creative aspect of production. I’m able to build the foundation of a website (albeit un-themed or designed) in a matter of minutes and know that it’s live without me having to do any of the tricky hosting/database business.

However, because Drupal Gardens does not offer secure staging, the client content is always live and being crawled by search engines on the web. This could be an issue if your client doesn’t shut down their original website. That means they would have two websites operating at once, which, if they both have duplicate content, could potentially result in a lower SEO ranking.

Q: Any drawbacks to using Drupal Gardens?

Joy: Well, there was definitely a learning curve figuring out how to utilize the modules, such as a Gallery module or Google Analytics module.

The customizable admin module page in Drupal Gardens

Since this was a platform beta (Drupal Gardens has since come out of beta), a lot of the learning curve was through trial and error. People who are already familiar with Drupal—the terminology, how to navigate the admin back-end, and so on—are definitely at a higher advantage to learning how to use Drupal Gardens.

However, when you’re working in Drupal Gardens, at the top there’s a help button with a nice drop down menu that lists popular videos with links, other documents, and online support. Those were insanely helpful. Plus, when I couldn’t find an answer for an issue I had, I posted the problem in their online forum, and they usually got back to me within a day. The people who work there are very thorough and patient with their answers.

Q: So basically anyone can create a website now?

Joy: I think it’s important that people don’t misjudge its greatness because there’s the stigma that anyone with a computer can make a website…while that may be true to some extent it doesn’t mean that the website is good. The content is key, it must be designed well, and of course all functions have to work across platforms and browsers. Drupal Gardens can help streamline that process, but it’s not the catch-all solution for building websites. Every website has its own unique requirements and Drupal Gardens isn’t the right fit for every project.

Q: When would you use Drupal Gardens over another design/development tool?

Joy: Some web projects have a smaller scope, but still need good design and a solid workflow for managing content. Drupal Gardenss is best for websites that don’t require a lot of complexity and add-on features. Otherwise, too much time is spent creating workarounds and compensating for what Drupal Gardens lacks, when perhaps the site could have been built from scratch even faster. So I’d say if you have a simple site you need up fast, that’d be a good time to try Drupal Gardens. For more complex sites, the fact that you can export to a full Drupal site gives you the power to add features once you have created the initial framework and design in Drupal Gardens. But those should be planned for in the design process so you don’t end up with a Frankenstein interface.

Q: Are there any specific features about Drupal Gardens that you like?

Joy: When you’re logged in to your site and you’re in the Appearance palette, there’s a tab called “Advanced” that allows you to paste in any custom CSS coding, which makes up for any difficulty theming issues in the Appearance palette itself. You can over-ride, or write the CSS code yourself, in that Advanced tab, which is nice.

The window to integrate custom CSS code into your appearance palette

Q: Any tips for first-time Drupal Gardens users?

Joy: Have a copy of your website open after you publish it in another browser window so you can view changes live as they are made, and also see how they behave in other web browsers.

Have you used Drupal Gardens for a site? What did you think? Any hiccups or workarounds you discovered? We are just getting started with this new tool from Acquia so we would love to hear what others think.