I posted some thoughts on the user experience during the installation process on the issue tracker above.

I think before plunging into adding more sophisticated plugin installers/downloaders and profile managers there are some fundamental user experience issues that should be addressed.

My recommendation for a first principle for guiding thinking on the design process is from Kaizen, the Poka-Yoke principle. Make it as fool-proof as possible and don’t set the user up for failure: e.g. the missing settings.php file always triggers an error meaning that most users trying Drupal for the first time are guaranteed to get an error message.

What would these profiles be?
“Click here if you plan on a single-person website with a blog”?
“Click here if you plan on a single-person website with a blog and a calendar”?
“Click here if you plan on a multi-user website with a ………….”?

Will i not always wonder if i should have chosen another profile the first time i run into any problems?

I am so happy with drupal right now – download, unpack, upload, install. Thats it – up and running!

Got it ?

Improving the installation experience as a starter shouldn’t be too difficult.

Wire frames?
Prototypes?
Core patches?

How about making it easier for users to understand how to add a settings.php file while on their site without needing to visit drupal.org for installation instructions?

Once the site is installed, rather than have a verbose page as there is now, it would be better to have a basic page to log in users that says:

“Congratulations, You have installed your site successfully. Click Here to visit the administration page to manage your site.”

To non-logged in users:

“Congratulations, [root user] has installed Drupal on [site url] successfully. If you are [root user] Click Here to sign in.” and on sign in they reach /admin

On the /admin page how about a sticky above the current settings system that contains some information on how to use /admin. The sticky can be hidden or set to show randomized tips. A paginated how to use Drupal or /admin can also be used in the sticky area (solving the disappearing help issue.)

If there are talks in #drupal-usability on irc please do twitter (from the drupalredesign account?) when they are going to happen and when unscheduled talks are in progress

At some point in your diagram you mention “Take over WordPress” . can you please detail on this ? Simply easy UX will not help as WP has already easier UX.

WP provides multiple blogs to each of the multiple users out-of-the-mu-box. D7 provides only single blog per user.

There is no easy way to show Calendar block per user per blog or list of Categories in the sidebar. WP also gives almost out of the box to each blogger
- custom header ( possible in Drupal)
- comments made and comment got in side block/side bar ( not possible in drupal)
- highlighted threaded reply by Author to each or any of the reply poster ( not possible in drupal)
- autosave features comes as deafult

Only UX, if there are not the features of WP and more, will not help to take over WP,imho

cwgordon7 – “This issue will deal with integration of installation profiles with the new plugin manager system. The current plugin manager module doesn’t do this, but this will open up all sorts of possibilities. First of all, rather than provide a limited subset of core installation profiles during initial installation, we could list *all* applicable installation profiles on drupal.org. This way, we greatly boost the visibility of install profiles – the goal of them is supposed to be to make it easier for a Drupal newbie to set up a site of a particular type, but they don’t do much good if the vast majority of Drupal newbies are ignorant of their existence. This is certainly at least part of the reason why we haven’t seen many install profiles (along with the need for better API functions).

A second possibility (in addition to the first one) would be using plugin manager to fetch any necessary modules (and themes?) from drupal.org, and install them automatically with the profile. This would save profiles from the necessity of either shipping with all the required contributed modules (and updating whenever any of those modules comes out with a new release) or making its users download any contributed modules themselves (tedious and bad user experience). This issue will explore this possibility as well as the first one, though it may later be split off into a fifth issue.”

Link to issue: http://drupal.org/node/395480

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37594523@N07/3459320783/

Apparrently, Flickr won’t list this photo in their rss feeds until I have 5 images uploaded to Flickr. So that’s why I’m posting the link here.

Josh