Looking for a cloud-based platform for social publishing (books, media) and community support (forums, blogs)? One that works off-the-shelf the same day and that you can afford?
Check out Drupal Gardens. It's Drupal 7, fully hosted by Acquia (enterprise Drupal specialists who offer solutions and support). I find the pricing unbelievably low for what it includes, and its main drawback is actually a great benefit.
Let me explain: Because Drupal Gardens supports a very controlled set of modules, they can commit to keeping your site upgraded and working. Those of you who have maintained web CMS tools know of what I speak: those lovely plug-ins and clever customizations that you depend on to meet your requirements make you vulnerable to your platform aging and breaking. Even without them, migrating your site to a new major version is often postponed indefinitely because of the breakage and effort it involves. Yet not staying current is a security risk, making your site vulnerable to hacking and loss. With this kind of controlled hosting, the product experts are responsible for keeping your platform updated for you, to the latest technology versions, fixes, and enhancements.
So, just how limited is limited? Within that set of modules that Drupal Gardens allows us to use, I verified that I could enable content access control as well as the Book module with page-level versioning and roll-back, which are the key pieces needed for tech docs. It also offers complete access to custom CSS theme development, content tagging, web forms, and more.
I verified with support that a few critical features we need are not yet supported, specifically: workflow around pending and published content, and the ability to insert reusable content at will within other pages (versus adding a boilerplate before or after page content, which you can). It's frequently the case that such features already exist, but they are not (yet) among the core set of Drupal Gardens offerings.
My hope is that someone will create a hosted distribution of Drupal that specifically builds out the features needed by technical documentation, which is a worthy vertical market. Drupal can do just about everything, if only someone puts the right pieces together! And if it's happening and I missed it, please let me know. :-)
Comments