Provide a link to a demo of Drupal

I just tried the demo: http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=132

It's broken. Everything is in an frame, it was using pushbutton, and when I checked it, no blocks were set up so you couldn't see the admin menu at all, or navigate anywhere, without breaking out of the frame then manually navigating to /admin - which is a bit pointless for a first time user.

So bumping to critical.

PS. I changed theme to Garland just to check this was possible, but still, it was really, really broken.

Note that that website does a core install and then gives folks free reign with admin access, then wipes and rebuilds from scratch every 2 hours. So, yes people can go in and break the site and do weird things to it and then it gets reset. The screenshot shows you what the fresh install looks like and so if it isn't that, then someone has been playing - that is the nature of the entire site.

I have no real position on it being linked on the front page but it is useful for folks that want to play and see. It was actually how I first discovered and decided to use Drupal. I got to see the back end and basic workflow before I even had to download and figure out how to install the thing. Very useful.

Yeah, the crashing part I get as being a problem (even though that is a stupid, petty reason - what does standards compliance have to do with how a site with full anon admin access is run anyway), I was more responding to catch's post about it just being a messed up install.

Ok I think there's a few issues here.

* I originally thought this was linking off to a screencast and couldn't believe anyone would think the screencasts were so bad, hence why I checked it. It could do with an intermediate page on drupal.org, maybe linking direct to the demo if it's going to be used at all.

* Out of 8 links, it's the only one that leads outside *.d.o. On principle I don't think any link on the front page (excluding very occasional ones in teasers) should be external, especially not a highlighted one

* With the 2 hour refresh it's not going to be broken all the time, but it'll be broken some of the time, that's enough to make the value of it questionable as a marketing tool

* opensourcecms.com is great for browsing through random CMSes to take a look (I think I found Drupal that way too!), but it's not great for showing off any particular CMS. Also anyone who makes their first visit to opensourcecms via that link will probably not immediately grasp how these demos work, and like Laura said, be sorely disappointed if someone's already got there and messed around with it. A screencast would probably show off the backend better.

* If we really, really want a live demo link up there, then I think a demo.drupal.org site with a similar refresh should be considered. Maybe this could be funded as part of the d.o redesign/marketing efforts because I know these things aren't trivial to run properly. Even better would be a multi-site install that opens a fresh database/settings.php for each new session then wipes it again after x amount of time - then everyone gets a clean, time-limited installation to play with.

I think the best replacement would be a handbook page with
* Link to opensourcecms's demo, with disclaimer and advice about 2-hour free-for-all
* Links to introductory videocasts like http://drupal.org/videocasts/installing-6
* Links to relevant resources for completely new users.

Why not host the demo on demo.drupal.org?
Opensourcecms.org recently added advertisement on the top, so it is very unattractive.
Also, if we send visitors to this external site (which opens in the same window!) they may end up on opensourcecms.org, trying other CMS's, and they will never return to Drupal.org.

And I have just blocked the admin user in the demo. So if you want to try the demo right now, you cannot login with admin - demo (Sorry, unrecognized username or password), LOL! But it is also enough if you change the username of admin and save changes. (Sorry, just for demonstration of the weakness of this demo)

Even more fun: change the admin username to "youWillNeverGuessIt", then save the changes. If you do this at the beginning of the 2 hours period, then you unlocked all the other users, and you can do whatever you want, no one will be able to delete your work.

Also, I have just looked at the demo, how does it looks when the 2 hours period just begun? Well, horrible:
-There are 2 'Administer' menu item (?)
-The default theme is Bluemarine
-Google ads in the top, and also inside Drupal

(BTW agree with Laura: "the demo is pretty weak, looks very unattractive, fails to show off the wonderful Drupal features, and in general probably ends up convincing people that Drupal is not for them.")

I attached a screenshot. It also promotes a Joomla book :)

Bence, you just explained in detail, why it is difficult to run a demo site, which allows people to check out stuff but at the same time not break the system. That's why it is outsourced. Seems to me so far, that the people at drupal.org have better things to put their precious time in.

I agree they're hard, and also that there's better things to do. However I also think the link to the current demo is quite a bit worse than no linked demo at all - people can go to opensourcecms if they want to anyway.

Based on #6, how about a page which jumps off to screencasts (probably some thumbs/direct links then a link to /videocasts) plus themegarden.org and drupalsites.net ? Then you can look at install/internals - which as demonstrated isn't actually possible at opensourcecms half the time, and also see live demos of contrib themes, and then the site showcase. To me that's almost the same thing with less capacity for breakage. And the two external sites don't advertise competing software ;)

(edit to fix wrong path)

Just a note, we already have a http://drupal.org/videocasts (which is an earlier alias for http://drupal.org/handbook/customization/videocasts) which is where all of our videos live.

We will be upgrading our demo at http://drupal.neemtree.com.au to Drupal 6 soon, and are happy to take adjustments/suggestions on board if it is linked to from d.o. Its hosted on Dreamhost shared server and I'm not sure what kind of load it can handle, but it hasn't gone down yet.

This seems to have been addressed.

I still think linking people straight out to an unreliable external site for a demo is worse than no demo at all, and its still there, so re-opening this.

Also: the landing page on opensourcecms.com is really ugly. I was embarrassed when I came from drupal.org.

We need a warning page to prepare people. I like drumm's proposal at #6.

(BTW shouldn't this be Documentation-Marketing?)

Maybe somebody would want to provide an install profile so that we could run our own demo on demo.drupal.org and reset it every 2 hours.

Killes, could paranoia module be modified to work well in this environment? Perhaps to just disallow editing/disabling the admin account, to keep testers from locking others out of the demo site at any given time?

http://drupal.org/project/paranoia

I guess it could. I am not really concerned about somebody locking somebody else out, though. The site would be set up again after a short while anyway. More important is that they can't execute php on the server, but with Drupal 6 this isn't a problem.

This could be handled with the demo.module ?

http://drupal.org/project/demo ?

There has been no progress with this report in one year.

I checked the demo on Open Source CMS, and I have not found anything wrong with that (except they are not using the best Drupal theme).
Still, I think we could create a demo that shows some of the advanced features Drupal has. The demo hosted on OSC doesn't have CCK, or Views installed (which is understandable, as they test the CMSs without any additional plugins/modules) that are two of the modules that most of the Drupal-powered sites have.
A link to the demo site reported in the front page could also help.

Perhaps with Drupal 7 coming out this year, now is a good time to think about a D7 demo.drupal.org subsite.

Thoughts?

Sending this to the Redesign Queue with the question:

Are we going to link to a demo of Drupal?

I created an issue about creating a demo screencast a few days ago #913782: Create screencast that introduces Drupal, link from the home page. I'm unaware of having a sandboxed D7 demo site though. It would be a lot of volunteer time to set up and maintain, though perhaps if other think it would get good usage and be a benefit to Drupal newcomers/evaluators, it's worth considering. At least with a screencast, you create it once and don't have to 'maintain' it.

This is really an issue for drupal.org webmasters, since a demo site is not part of the redesign.

Tagging for future finding purposes though.

What is the absolute best way for a newcomer to try out Drupal? Drupal Gardens! Not because it is Dries' service, but because it rocks! The problem with the OpenSourceCMS.com demo is that everyone administer the same site, whereas on Drupal Gardens you get your own Drupal site to play with. Yes, Drupal Gardens contains additional modules, but that is even better, since the new user can test not only Drupal core, but even contributed modules right away.

So the front page should promote Drupal Gardens. Registration takes only 1 minute, then the user can fully test drive Drupal, with cool modules already installed. In contrast, trying out Drupal by downloading and installing it is a lot of time for a newbie. Download the package, then read the install instructions, then deal with install problems (spend 10 minutes googling "how to disable PHP register globals"), then search for modules and install them etc. All these hassles are non-existent at Drupal Gardens.

Changing the component on this, as this is not a request for a story to be promoted to the home page. While I love Drupal Gardens, I have some concerns about using it as an official Drupal demo, as it contains several modules that haven't been released on Drupal.org and is somewhat different than a standard Drupal download.

I think the best of all worlds would be a handbook page as proposed in #6 and #10, but which also has links to external demos, with disclaimers.

Linking to Drupal gardens sounds silly, as major parts completely change the way Drupal 7 works out of the box. As far as I know our infrastructure teams consider hosting a demo a no-go area.

I am not saying "no" to hosting a demo at all, however, we do not have the resources to simply host e.g. demo.drupal.org.

Such a deployment would need a team of people who would make sure that such a demo is regularly wiped of content, can't make the rest of the d.o infra unstable etc. If such a team is available, we can talk.

Why does it sound silly linking to Drupal Gardens? DG is Drupal 7 core + modules. You can disable all the extra modules, so that you end up with the core functionalities only.

But it contains already the most popular modules, so DG is the best place to try out Drupal.
Anyway, how many people use Drupal core only, without additional modules? Why should a demo show only Drupal core?

DrupalGardens != Drupal. DrupalGardens == Drupal + proprietary theme builder code + a variety of patches to existing contrib modules not yet incorporated upstream. Trying to tell people it's the same thing as Drupal is a lie. It's a Drupal-based service competing with WordPress.com. OpenAtrium isn't Drupal either, even though all of their stuff is open source.

I'm not saying DrupalGardens isn't great, they've done a lot of awesome work. But someone using that and then coming back to Drupal is going to be very WTF about it. So, -1.

Additionally, DG is going to start charging soon. We need these demo sites to be free.

Gerhard, if such a team were to materialize and host Drupal 7 + Demo module on their own VPS somewhere, would it be possible to get a demo.drupal.org domain pointing to them? In other words, is this something we'd actually have to maintain in-house, or could it potentially be outsourced to a trusted community member?

I totally wouldn't mind to outsource it, however you'd need to get Dries' approval for this since it is his domain.

I've been working on (and am still in progress with) some improved demo sites for Drupal modules, and am interested in helping to set up and maintain a better Drupal core demo too.

Totally agree that a demo should be of Drupal not DG. In my mind, a demo should provide a similar experience to an out of the box install done oneself, but without the hassle of installing.

How about linking to Webenabled? Anyone can install and configure a Drupal site for free (as well as a number of distros), and they even give you non-command-line Drush tools to use to install new modules.

We've put together a demo of Drupal on:

http://www.websitedesigndrupal.com/

Which has a text editor installed and a few other modules. This gives you more of an idea of what Drupal's like with a bit of configuration, rather than right out of the box.

The updated OpenSourceCMS.com is all that is needed IMO.

http://www.opensourcecms.com/demo/1/183/Drupal
Admin Username: admin
Admin Password: demo123

It's a default D7 install. The demo automatically gets reinstalled one hour after creation and you can reinstall it on demand by a push of a button, the process only take a couple of seconds. The advertisement mentioned earlier is now optional (you can hide it) and there's a notice that says "opensourceCMS is ad supported. The above banner are not included in the official download" not to confuse anyone. Any edit you make, if you edit the admin username or password for example, will only affect your own installation. Other people accessing the url will get to a default install.
I say this is a great service to testdrive a clean default D7 without having to register/provide any personal information. Thumbs up for OpenSourceCMS :)

Other than the D7 demo being at version 7.25 this seems to work fine. I"m closing this issue as it's been inactive for a year. Demo seems to work fine now.