In this new blog post, Dries Buytaert, who founded Drupal and spent many years as one of Acquia’s most senior leaders, openly shares what he sees as one of the biggest mistakes in Acquia’s history. The mistake in question was shutting down a product called Acquia Gardens, a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform that allowed anyone to create Drupal websites without needing to write code.
Buytaert explains that when Acquia was not yet so large and resources were scarce, they had to make a tough choice: either double down on Drupal Gardens or pursue another market that looked very attractive, software for the world’s largest companies. They chose at that time, ten years ago, the second path and decided to shut down Drupal Gardens, which the Drupal founder himself now regards as one of the biggest mistakes he has made.
To correct this mistake, Acquia is launching a SaaS (Software as a Service) called Acquia Source to serve simple Drupal based sites. In a sense this new service will try to fill the space left by Drupal Gardens, a platform launched in 2009 as a SaaS offering that made it possible to create Drupal sites without writing code and that came to host more than 100.000 websites. It was a product widely used by marketing professionals and small teams that needed to publish without depending on developers, precisely the target audience for the Drupal CMS.
According to Dries, the withdrawal of Drupal Gardens left many organizations with Drupal or Acquia based software for their enterprise platforms and other solutions such as WordPress for smaller sites and blogs. The new Acquia Source has been created to put an end to this fragmentation, although by 2025 WordPress has also advanced significantly and already seems to be pushing its enterprise solution WordPress VIP in earnest.
After eighteen months of development, Acquia Source is already being tested by some customers and is built upon and draws from open code, just as Buytaert mentioned when it came time to choose Acquia’s new CEO. As proof of this he points to Drupal Canvas, the new visual editor.
In this way, Acquia Source will soon be available to small professional teams with limited technical knowledge and will complement Acquia’s current enterprise offering, which consists of Acquia Cloud and Acquia Cloud Site Factory.
We will see how this new launch turns out and whether it really helps to reverse the decline Drupal has experienced in recent years, which has been especially noticeable since the change from Drupal 7 to version 8.
You can access the full text on Dries Buytaert’s blog: “The product we should not have killed”
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with AI and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
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