...and now anyone can set up a fresh, hosted Drupal 7 website in seconds—for free.

From Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, and president of Acquia, the company behind Drupal Gardens (basically, a site like wordpress.com, except with more awesome):

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!

I expect this service, and others like it, to grow in popularity in the coming years. For many parishes, a site on Drupal Gardens would do 90% of what they'd need (or 100%, if they weren't shooting for the stars...).

And it's free (for basic plans), community-based, and super-easy to use (the theme developer is especially nice). On top of that, you can, at any time, download your entire site and put it on your own web host!