Drupal Gardens Revisited - Beta Review
This is the follow up review I promised to my earlier post reviewing Drupal Gardens Preview Edition. Since then, the good folks at Acquia have worked long and hard and ironed out several issues, added some new much requested features and also moved Gardens to a beta stage. I was given a beta account, so I checked it out once again.
Before reading further, readers might want to skim over my initial review of Gardens.
Introduction
Compared to before, the main Gardens page has not changed much. It still has nice large visible fonts and has a Wordpress sort of user friendly appeal about it. This is a welcome thing indeed.
Logging into Drupal Gardens, I am greeted by the same interface as before. I have been hunting around for the admin theme used here and I had incorrectly assumed that it was a custom developed interface. It is in fact, the new Admin module for Drupal, which is available as a free, open source download. Based on the screenshot, readers might be tempted to dismiss this as another Rootcandy-esque attempt. But no, this is actually an improved admin interface. I urge readers to try the Admin module on your own Drupal sites, you won't be disappointed.
As a side note, I've always personally liked the fact that Drupal does not have a separate admin screen. I've seen no need for it and the simple expanded Navigation block on the right often takes care of all my needs. But in my own interaction with clients and based on usability studies of CMS, an admin interface or control panel is a plus. Wordpress and Joomla both have it, and now Drupal does too.
New features
Media Library
This was mentioned in my earlier review and was also asked in the survey. Its great to see that its been implemented. Drupal Gardens now has a basic media library to which images and videos can be uploaded. I tested with a 5 MB .mp4 file and a few images. There is even a nice video player that lets users view the media in their library. It would be nice to see some basic editing capabilties for the images. For starters, just 2 features: cropping and resizing. But for now, there is an "add media from URL" feature. It works with images on external image hosting services like Flickr, which in turn support basic image editing. In addition, services like Picnik and Aviary
can also work with Flickr. Adding an image from an external service requires the direct path to the image file.
But trying to add a youtube or blip
video to the media library failed.
Exporting of Sites
I requested for this feature when answering the Acquia survey and I'm very glad to see that they have implemented it. Users of Acquia Gardens need not worry about a vendor lock in anymore. If any Gardens user wishes to take their site to a different server, exporting the site is a simple one click operation. The database and site files are all compressed into a single archive and available for download within seconds.
AJAX Admin Overlay
A new AJAX admin overlay has been installed. I am not sure if this was present in the preview release. It eliminates the need for page reloads on the Admin interface and instead overlays an AJAX box with all the options for each section when clicked. I believe this was one of the suggestions to come out of the D7UX 
initiative, along with the above mentioned Admin module.
Revised Features
WYSIWYG Editor
The WYSIWYG module has been well implemented with CK Editor. The old FCKeditor skin is still being used by default and doesn't quite fit the theme of the rest of the site which is all round and curvy. I would have probably just left the default Kama skin. But no big deal, it works.
One issue I did notice on CK editor is the format selection which runs between Heading 1 to Heading 6 and normal text. Given that the post title is usually heading 1 or 2, good SEO would require that a page not have too many heading 1 or 2. For my clients, I usually restrict the WYSIWYG editor to only being between heading 3 to heading 6. A minor point, but worth considering.
Improved Help
The help section has a lot more content and it seems to be an improvement over the standard Drupal Help. But I am still left feeling that its more than a end user is going to read. If Acquia wishes to truly make a Drupal for Dummies, then the help needs to be more interactive, more graphical. I am still not sure if the target audience for Drupal Gardens is developers or end users. Putting the full power of Drupal and all its modules into a usable package for the average laymen is hard. Some compromise has to be made between power and usability. At this stage, I'm guessing that Gardens would be an ideal way for non-technical users to get introduced into Drupal. There are plenty of excellent Drupal screencasts on Blip.TV. A simple step to improve the help would be to simply place these screencasts on relevant sections of the help page. The screencast should be directly linked to start at the section of the video that talks about that specific feature and end when that is covered. This way, a person wanting to know about writing a blog post can simple watch a 30 second clip and do it rather than reading 2 paragraphs about it.
Summary
Of the 5 things I listed on my last wishlist, 3 of have directly addressed. Positive attempts have been made to fix both the bad points and the good things have been retained. Some of the features users requested Acquia such as the ability to export sites, have been added. Despite it all, the product is still only in beta, which means that by the time the final Gardens rolls out, we could expect to see a very polished product. Another noteworthy fact is that Gardens is being run on Drupal 7 which is still in alpha . Yet, I have not seen any serious bugs on Gardens. Assuming that this is the same codebase as what we find at drupal.org, its a good sign. Drupal has always been a reliable CMS, but I'm hoping that with version 7, Drupal graduates into a enterprise level CMS/CMF. This would make it a lot easier to sell it to the few remaining clients that still prefer a closed source, big brand name solution.
