Today we've reached another important milestone at Acquia: Drupal Gardens is now in open beta. No more beta codes. No more waiting to try the service. Now anyone can access Drupal Gardens and create a free Drupal 7 site!

It's been fun to watch Drupal Gardens grow and mature during the private beta. In addition to building out the feature set, we've spent a great deal of time improving the stability and underlying performance of the service. And we've had a wild ride on Drupal 7 HEAD along the way, as Jacob Singh describes so colorfully:

Running from an Alpha versus HEAD is like the difference between playing Jenga on a sleeping elephant to playing Jenga on a cocaine addled elephant riding a skateboard being jabbed in the [rear] with a hot poker.

We've also invested plenty of time with Drupal Gardens users - gathering feedback, performing user tests, discussing potential features. One request that was added in the latest release is site duplication. This is the ability to clone an existing site, including its design, functionality, information architecture and content, to create a new site. It's one of the first Enterprise Drupal Gardens features, enabling site builders and designers to do rapid prototyping in Drupal Gardens and roll out new sites quickly according to pre-defined templates. Site duplication will evolve into site and theme marketplaces where anyone can share site templates for use by others.

Drupal Gardens continues to advance with great strides. I encourage you to take Drupal Gardens for a test drive and to share your feedback with us.