Anonymous users should never see "welcome to Drupal" screen

The question is what should be displayed in it's place? One question is how often in a 'real life' situation would this happen? Since the welcome page is only displayed when there is no content promoted to /node, it will disappear when content is posted.

Marking as duplicate of #407022: Show help and configuration links when modules are enabled.

No review for ages, sadly - I dont see any UX arguments why this is bad.

Some minor problems:

1.)

-    );\n
+    );    \n

The patch adds trailing whitespace near the end of the chunk.

2.) Using pre-defined functions like user_is_anonymous() (instead of comparing the global directly) is self-documenting as well as robust for future changes.

3.) t('Welcome to ' . variable_get('site_name', ''). Don't try to localize a user-set string. You need placeholders - ie:

t('Welcome to @site!' , array('@site' => variable_get('site_name', '')))

By the way, are we sure this variable will be set at this point? Showing a guest a cryptic half-sentence of "Welcome to !" looks even dirtier than mistakenly calling it "your" website. If it might not be set, an alternative message ("Welcome to this Drupal website!") would be good - we can't use a default value without localizing sentence fragments, which should be avoided.

It works great otherwise! :)

earnie: please don't kill kittens,

Arancaytar: Can you or karschsp provide a screenshot of the annonymous state.

I agree with earnie, after installation the site should be set to maintenance mode or some variation thereof. After install a site has no content for users to see so if by chance a user finds their way to the site and are met with no content and no reason why, they probably won't be back. A simple splash screen like when in maintenance mode would suffice.

And then? And then you set your site online and anonymous still see this welcome message.

Seriously, this issue tries to solve an problem, but not the cause. All we can get here is a half-baked solution that might work under very certain circumstances.

That's the reason why I marked it duplicate. It's a waste of time IMHO.

When /node is loaded and user is anonymous and there is no published content then the page could return a maintenance mode-like screen, an 'under-construction' or 'come back soon' or something of the sorts.

-1 for showing something vastly different (like an offline message) on the /node page when no content exists, than from what you would show on any other page such as /user/login when no content exists.

Drupal sites don't need content to be up and running (they don't even need nodes at all, if you are using it as a framework rather than a CMS), and we shouldn't make assumptions about it. All that this condition checks for is whether content exists - not whether a site is in maintenance mode or publically available.

I dont get all of this, why can't we just set it to - No content is currently available, for annonymous? When content is added, it will show up and this message will dissapear / stay on that one page no one looks.

I know its normal for usability issues, to get 200 x -1 in the beginning but in this case I don't see the larger issues.

One problem with using a 404 page is that no blocks are shown on Drupal's 404. This means that the user login block won't appear on the home page by default. That's bad UX.

Well, here's a start...

I wrapped the default welcome message in a theme function so it can be easily changed by a theme. That doesn't necessarily solve our problem, though, since what we're really trying to do is provide useful information to someone who just installed Drupal for the first time. Likely, they would not yet have changed the theme.

However, this provides the possibility for the default theme to override the theme function, for use in install profiles, and whatnot.

The contents of the theme function is up for debate, but I made it so an $account object is passed to the theme function. This way, it can check for $account->uid == 0 and display different information.

testbot?

(Just figured out that the testbot won't test unless the status is either "needs review" or "reviewed & tested by the community".)

I added a bit to the patch which I hope will demonstrate a little of what's possible with this theme function. Now, it checks to see which content types the user has access to create, and provides direct links to those node/add/$type forms.

This (partially) addresses @emmajane's recommendation that creating content should be the most important part of the message.
http://drupal.org/node/475596#comment-1639610

This patch came out of a nice conversation in #drupal tonight.

Scope:
a) The welcome message stays
b) It moves to /admin/welcome
c) There's a way to disable it
d) Install redirects there after the initial install
e) Change node_page_default() so that all it says is "No content posted yet" for anonymous users. For logged-in users, it links to node/add and admin/settings/site-information; hopefully providing a bit of guidance as to what they might want to do next.

Because it's now its own menu item, it can be changed with hook_menu_alter, or disabled completely using admin/build/menu. It can also be enabled, disabled, or moved by an install profile. I would imagine that the "minimal" install profile may want this disabled upon install.

The welcome page could still be a theme function or tpl.php file, but I didn't roll those options into this patch. It may be best to (eventually, maybe) move this to advanced help, or similar. Again, not within the scope of this issue, however.

This got fixed as part of #475596: [meta-issue] Fix the unholy abomination that is the welcome screen.

Sorry, Shawn! I forgot you had started this over here. :(

No worries! I saw that emmajane had done a better job, so I stopped working on this one.