Now there's an easy way to build a basic Drupal site. Drupal Gardens is a new ad-supported web-based Drupal site creation and hosting engine similar to WordPress.com's free blog service. Choose from among three preconfigured site design templates--campaign, product, or blog (more templates are supposedly coming)--and be up and running with a Drupal website in just a few minutes.

So far, the number of site themes is way more limited than what one gets at WordPress.com, but unlike WordPress, no need to pay extra to be able to modify the CSS to create a custom look and style for the site. Drupal Gardens is also more powerful than WordPress.com in terms of the different content types and configuration options offered. For instance, the site creator can choose between blogs, news, forums, polls, or pages. However, Drupal Gardens is limited to a very small subset of the several thousand contributed modules available on drupal.org. This should be thought of as Drupal lite for those that need a fairly basic Drupal installation or just want to try it out.