
Drupal Goes Hosted With Private Beta Launch of “Gardens” - mgrouchy
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/drupal-garden/
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shabda
<http://www.drupalgardens.com/create-site>

Firefox 3.0 or higher required.

Firefox version 3.0 or higher is required to use the Drupal Gardens beta.
While support for other browsers is coming soon, for now Firefox provides the
optimum Drupal Gardens experience.

:(

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simonw
Not supporting WebKit (even for an alpha release) is pretty poor form.

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westbywest
Agreed, and I do Drupal development from time to time. Restricting common
browsers like IE, Chrome, and Safari entirely is a great way to tell people to
go away.

Simply popping up a warning dialog staying your particular browser is not
supported would probably be more effective, since then you could more casual
visitors, and entice them enough to return with FF3 later.

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GiraffeNecktie
Drupal hosting has been around for years hasn't it? Most shared hosting
services seem to have one click installs.

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mechanical_fish
Yes. And such systems make the first click very easy. Unfortunately, the
second and subsequent clicks remain notoriously difficult.

Gardens is an attempt to address issues beyond that first click.

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jacquesm
Best of luck. Especially when you're going to upgrade 2 or 3,000 sites to the
next major release.

Another big stumbling block I've noticed when hosting large numbers of drupal
sites is that drupal uses a very large number of database tables (>50,
sometimes >100) to accomplish relatively simple stuff causing big problems on
the database servers.

If you host only a single site 100 tables is no big deal but when you have
large numbers of small sites this becomes a real bottleneck.

I believe recent versions of drupal are a bit better behaved in this respect.

~~~
westbywest
The next major release of Drupal (7) has a fair number of improvements towards
semi-automated maintenance and upgrades. Most of these leverage off a command
line interface called drush.

Also, Joomla, Drupal's closest analog, has a comparable number of DB tables
per site. The problem is more likely with prevailing conventions in certain
open-source CMS design, than with a particular CMS. Drupal at least lets you
share strategic tables across multiple sites.

~~~
mikepurvis
"The problem is more likely with prevailing conventions in certain open-source
CMS design, than with a particular CMS."

This is my understanding of the issue. I had some experience with Joomla back
when it was Mambo, and my impression was that a huge number of the tables
represented metadata and configuration of various kinds. It seemed like there
was an almost fetish-like desire for everything to be configurable from a web
UI, and a very heavy price was paid for this flexibility in the backend.

Compare this with a product like PunBB, where it is much more opinionated, and
some aspects of the configuration can only be altered by editing key source
files. For example, to add or remove emoticons from the bulletin board or edit
the curse-word replacement list, you have to edit an array in a file
somewhere.

Which may seem like a pain, but the end result is that you save on a big
complicated admin screen that will only get used once or twice per
installation, and for every subsequent pageview, you're just pulling stuff in
from a file rather than a DB table.

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rinich
I really wish Drupal had a design team capable of making things as attractive
as Wordpress.com. Why didn't they get one of the big Drupal graphic designers,
like Acko, on this?

