WebEnabled provides an instant, powerful Drupal development environment

Today I discovered WebEnabled, a really cool new service that can get you up and running with Drupal in a quick and innovative way. But first, some background.

Recently people at our meetups have been wondering what's the best/easiest way to get Drupal installed and start working with it. Until now I've promoted two options:

• Use the Acquia Drupal Stack Installer on your laptop or desktop machine – this 1-step installer provides everything you need to start running Drupal locally.
• Install a development environment like XAMPP, MAMP or WAMP onto your laptop or desktop, then download and install Drupal.

Both of these options get Drupal set up on your desktop or laptop, not on a web server, but that's often ideal for learning drupal, developing your site, and adding/editing files. The pain here can come when:

• You want to show your site to someone who's not looking over your shoulder.
• You want to collaborate with others while developing the site.
• You're ready to launch your site to the world.

In each of these cases you'll need to transfer your local site to a web host that supports Drupal, a process with some learning curve (though definitely doable.)

The new service I'm excited about is called WebEnabled. You sign up for a free account (there are also paid options) and you get a web workspace where you can manage multiple projects, and do automated, 1-click installations of not only Drupal 6, Drupal 7, Acquia Drupal, but other open source software like Joomla, Wordpress, etc. Here's the current list of applications you can install:

I installed Drupal 7 with WebEnabled, and in 30 seconds it installed and configured Drupal 7, gave me the web address (http://d7-laken.dev3.webenabled.net/ in this case), Drupal Admin login and password, SSH login to the server, and access to PHPMyAdmin. It's an instant remote development environment! You can roll out new installs of Drupal 6 or 7 in seconds, to play around with or start building your real site. Since you have SSH access, you can use any SFTP program to transfer files from your machine to your WebEnabled Drupal site, or you can use the WebEnabled Linux command line to install Modules and themes directly into your development environment.

The free account lets you install only 2 applications, and you need to 'renew' them monthly (still free) to keep them alive. Paid plans start at $10/month which allows 5 applications, with 2GB disk per application.

There are advanced options for collaboration: you can add multiple users to your project, who can all share SSH access; there's built-in Subversion version control if you use that (and you should!)

All this is set up as a development server, not meant for production use. When your site is ready to be launched to the world, WebEnabled has deployment features that let you easily push your project to another server. But they also offer VPS production server hosting as well for , so you could host there as well if the pricing works for you (it is more expensive than shared hosting like Dreamhost).

WebEnabled.com itself seems to be built with Drupal, which is very impressive!

For a potential new client of mine (a design firm with multiple clients) I'm faced with setting up a robust development environment and finding them a solid hosting platform. I've just started exploring it, but WebEnabled seems like a major contender.

If there is interest, we could do a meetup on how to use WebEnabled to get started with remote Drupal development and collaboration.

Please chime in: what are you using to get started with Drupal? Do you like a local install or prefer to have your site online? Would WebEnabled help the way you work?