Psst! I can hook you up with one of the most powerful tools on the Web. This is the good stuff; the juice that runs the Web sites of the White House and the United Nations World Food Programme, not to mention those of Beyonce and Britney Spears. It's Drupal, the open-source content management system and best-kept secret on the 'Net, only now, it's better.

At this point, I would've had to deliver my customary warning that on the geek scale, Drupal measures a full 10—and then some. Not anymore. Instead, I can focus on describing all the neat features of the new cloud-based tool Drupal Gardens, which makes setting up your own customized, highly interactive site a piece of cake. Well, just about. Similar to services such as Wordpress, which provides blog hosting, Drupal Gardens does the work of setting up and maintaining the code on a Drupal site. There's still quite a bit of work to do, but detailed support documentation such as the quick start guide and Drupal Gardens' simplified administrative framework reduces this task to about a five on that geek scale.

But the work you put in has a payoff. The real power of Drupal is the flexibility it provides for the creation and display of customized content. You decide what these pieces of content, called nodes, have for entry fields. In a book review node, for example, you could ask users to fill in a summary text box, select from a list of genres, or even list free-form tags to describe the book. Or you might create a library sign-up node to collect information such as the date, time, intended use, and resources required. You can even customize the fields for comments, so a simple node that asks, "What's your favorite book?" could accommodate student comments, including a title, author, and other information.

Beyond collection management, Drupal Gardens includes powerful tools for displaying dynamic content on your site. Through the combination of blocks (regions on the site that display content) and views (the definitions of what content is displayed), you decide what goes where on each page. This means that a longer teaser display of the most recent book review could always appear at the top of your content area, while a list of only the titles from older book reviews could be placed in a sidebar. Colors, fonts, and column layouts—with Drupal Gardens, you control everything.

Drupal Gardens is currently in beta, but opening up for new users. On launch, late 2010, you'll find a variety of hosting options, from ad-supported free pages to a basic $20 monthly plan, which includes a domain address of your choice. With the recent elimination of free sites on Ning, the free option from Drupal Gardens is a nice alternative for hosting a network site, including forums, photo sharing, and more. Online, customized, free or low cost, what better way to join the interactive Web 3.0 revolution than with an easy site created using Drupal Gardens?

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