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Drupal out of the box: let's make a community
First off, I need to apologize to @webchick for being called away from the Drupal BoF at Open Web Vancouver last night. It was great to have her here to do a run through with @chx1975 of where we're at with Drupal 7. I was around just long enough to once again raise the issue of what the default install profile will do.
We've come quite far in major core improvements, but we don't have a story for what Drupal is when you do a default install. What should Drupal do "out of the box"?
There is a placeholder issue for this now: #483987 Decide on direction for default install profile. As I've seen the UX process continue, I still see us focusing on building and constructing. The changes there have been excellent, but I think we're missing an opportunity to have a truly great out of the box experience. My codename for this is "drupaloob".
The first step is deciding the story for this. WordPress is a blog. We are not a blog. We are a multi user system. Can we turn on a minimal OOB experience that showcases some of our multi user and other strengths? In the words of President Obama, "Yes We Can!"
My personal opinion and outline for this is that we should ship with a "Community in a Box". I've documented it on groups.drupal.org. Regardless of the details of comments on or off, promoted by default, and other finer points, here is my user story for this Community in a Box:
A community site with front page articles, a community blogging section, discussion forums, and shared image galleries.
Anyone is welcome to sign up for an account and participate in the forums. After some time in the forums, users are invited to become contributors, and can post blog posts and photos, as well as submit unpublished articles.
The blogging functionality is a community multi user blog. It is not meant as one users blog, but rather a large community that can post quick thoughts responding to each other and sharing their ideas. (Note: this is in here because people get confused about "blog" functionality -- this is meant to highlight that having a community blog is not the same as a single user blog, so don't expect to be able to change titles and designs etc. -- your blog posts are in a shared, community space)
Editors are around and police the forums, as well as reviewing and publishing articles and other material for the front page.
The photo galleries are shared galleries: like the forum and the community blogs, users upload them to share, rather than in their own space. There are weekly suggestions for new gallery categories, and users can also tag photos with whatever they like to mix and match how the photos are grouped.
While I'm piling wishes on top of dreams, I'd even like to use the wizard that has been in core since Drupal 6 to make several parts of this OOB experience optional. That is, right at the beginning, users would have two options.
One would be to do an "express install" that would install everything with the defaults as I've outlined above.
The second would be to engage the wizard and answer a series of questions and options:
Do you want forums? yes/no
Do you want a community blog for contributors? yes/no
Do you want a community photo gallery? yes/no etc.
What do you think? What would you want people to experience when they first install Drupal 7? Edit the wiki, leave comments, or create some patches against default.profile.
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In a universe of infinite resources, I'd prefer to start with a pretty thorough investigation of Drupal's current and prospective adopters (possibly weighted toward prospects to favor growth) and how they're hoping to use their next installs, and then cluster the results into a few segments.
From there, create profiles that reflect those segments (e.g. "The Kitchen Sink," "Group Blog," "Organization's Web Presence", "Web Store", "Advocacy Campaign", "Developer Playground", "Ultra-light") with an accompanying theme. With each one, offer the customization wizard/express option.
But failing the resources to do that kind of market segmentation and profile/theme development, I love your approach, Boris.
Great timing on the post Boris. Addressing what Drupal does "out of the box" with installer profiles will help Drupal have a smaller core and ensure we maintain honest APIs, while at the same time make drupal out of the box experience more rewarding for people just getting started and wanting a simple site (which is the end goal of much of the d7ux work).
Installer profiles will help improve Drupal's user experience without baking Drupal a certain way that diminishes its flexible frame work advantages that make it attractive to build very custom projects. In short, focusing on installer profiles brings us closer to meeting ends goals of both first time drupal users and long time drupal developers, which currently appear to be diverging strategies.
The down the road possibilities from focusing more on installer profiles are wild. Drupal could offer several out of the box flavors right from Drupal.org; from a Wordpress clone, to a small business package, to an intranet package. Communities could form around the different installer packages and help decentralize development. Other companies that work with Drupal can also have their own distros (made easier by Drupal having a smaller core), which will help drupal meet the many mico-niches that make the web so exciting, especially help better build packages for other languages, 'a drupal intranet in Urbu anyone?', micro demands continue to surprise me. The flexibility you describe will help Drupal adjust to end users needs better.
Hey, Boris.
We're talking about this a bit at the Drupal Design Camp. I think one thing that might be cool would be to have a specialized theme to go with one or more core install profiles. Since designing a general theme is a very hard design problem, maybe designing a theme to fit a specific install profile would be an easier design problem.
Just something that got thrown around this weekend.
I made a call for a default theme to go with a custom install profile back in March in the D4D group. Making a theme that supports specific functionality makes for better usability and design.
That sounds good, you should call it BuddyPress. ;)
Does this comment form really have a six-row WYSIWYG menu above it? Using icons from Word 97?
Seriously though, some great collected thoughts.
Having a default install profile to go with the current usability improvements planned on d7ux.org would be awesome. This is particularly important in the context of the build tool.
To me, having just a shiny build tool still leaves a gap in the overall experience for a new drupal user. Assuming the tool is indeed built, what next? What does a drupal user do after they install D7?
In fact, building the tool with a default profile in mind will probably solve the challenges that Mark and Leisa are currently facing in defining the direction and specifics of the tool - the DOOB gives a context for the tool that is currently lacking and probably frustrating their efforts.
And, at least to my mind, a community install profile makes the best fit for the default, since we define Drupal largely as a social publishing platform. And, doing it with a wizard that lets people make optional choices would really take the DOOB experience to another level.
A project to keep an eye on for this: http://drupal.org/project/dsnf_install
Michelle
Thanks Michelle, but that will likely not be much help. I designed the scenario specifically so that it can be constructed with only core modules in D7.
I know we can build anything with Drupal and the cloud of contrib, but making it do something great out of the box is the challenge here.
Sorry, I missed that you were limiting yourself to just core. Yeah, that is definitely a challenge. Drupal's strength is really in contrib. Even my smallest brochureware site with less than 10 pages of content uses a few contrib modules.
Michelle
Yes, just core -- this is for inclusion with D7, out of the box, with just core modules. I'm not calling for yet another install profile - even if we don't do "community", we have to make Drupal do *something* out of the box.
Boris, it's not drupaloob, silly. It's DOOB, or Drupal Out Of Box. At least that's what I've been calling it for the last year and a half... :)
You keep forging ahead with your bad self! More defaults!