Subdivide the Drupal requirements page into multiple child pages

+1

I'm not so keen on splitting up this page. There are a series of steps to setting up the requirements, and they really are all necessary (not optional) which seems more appropriately put all in one place.

I'm not in favor of splitting the page either. Someone who is going to install Drupal needs to know about all the requirements. Splitting the page up means that they need to click around more, and it makes the top level page pretty much have no content. I don't see the benefits of splitting it up, and I do see the down-side.

I've got a slightly different take.

I'd agree with the OP that the page is starting to get a bit ugly. But it's mostly because it's wandered well beyond describing system requirements and has become a place to collect all sorts of tweaks and settings, especially for PHP.

A System Requirements page is usually a very succinct bulleted list of the required environment and nothing more. All the stuff about configuring PHP should be in a separate page (with a cross-reference from the requirements page).

I'm not sure I agree. Most or all of the PHP settings described on that page are not at the level of "tweaks", but actual requirements needed to run Drupal. Just because you have the right versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL doesn't mean Drupal will run on that system, with all of its features working.

I've rejiggered the PHP section a bit to separate out the general requirements from the version-specific requirements. Maybe that's enough to keep the page from being overwhelming.

That looks pretty reasonable to me. There may be some missing open UL tags or something -- the formatting is a bit off -- but nothing standing in the way of understanding or scanning the page IMO.

I've cleaned up the UL tags (I hope).

I think this page is easy to scan - and is makes sense. I'm going to set it to RTBC.

Still looks fine.