Write clear install profile descriptions

- Incorrect use of capital letters. Tsk!

- The descriptions feel unbalanced. One is two words, the other one is a sentence.

Most of the confusion is probably because both are called Drupal…
I think at this stage it's quite clear we are installing Drupal, so why not simply use

Standard installation

Minimal, for developers

As the labels and drop the descriptions

There's an issue somewhere which was going to call it the 'expert' profile - I can't find it at the moment though.

'For developers' sounds like it'll have simpletest and devel installed and enabled already, which'd be lovely, but sadly not.

I like

'Standard installation'.

I don't like either 'for experts' or 'for developers' - maybe 'For advanced users'. It's not that scary to put of the semi-adventurous, but it also has sufficient warning to put people off who really want the standard install.

Agree also that 'minimal' and 'bare bones' or similar language gets into overall arguments about what Drupal should do out of the box - whereas this is just whether or not certain things are enabled or configured.

Minimal also wouldn't be quite precise as we're actually enabling a bunch of modules that aren't required (technically).

I find "Standard installation" and "For advanced users" appealing but inconsistent as one refers to a type of installation and the other refers to the type of users that should use it.
"Default" and "For adavanced users" would get rid of that inconsistency IMO.
I'm fine with anything though, as long as that totally unneeded and doubled "Drupal" vanishes.

Well the type of installation would be one which is aimed at a particular type of users, no? But yeah I see what you mean.

This didn't actually trip anyone up at UB usability testing, but most people had to read through once or twice, decided they wanted 'commonly used modules', then moved on. Mark and Leisa's video had a similar thought process.

While it's quite a big decision to make really so I can understand reading through carefully, the phrase which people latch onto should be in the profile names, not in the middle of a sentence in the description. As long as we can do that, I also don't mind what they're called, but I'd be pretty happy with 'Default' and 'for advanced users'.

On reading #261882: 'Minimum' install profile I realize for the first time that I might actually be in the target group for the second profile. I was under the impression that it was much 'worse', as in not really usable at all before writing your own code or something. So it's actually more of a clean slate install then the totally desintegrated box of lego pieces I assumed it was…

Is it 'default' if you have to actively select it? (or is the first radio already selected indeed? It should be.)

• Standard
o Basic

• Standard - New to Drupal? Choose this one.
o Basic - A fresh start for experienced users.

Default is currently the default radio, but it's possible that adding extra install profiles could mess that up.

I like yoroy's a lot.

Although I love those descriptions, they seem a bit out of tone with the rest of Drupals way of talking. However the labels to me sound very good.

+1 for #10

Not to be contrarian, but neither of these descriptions tells me much, other than which I should use if I am just getting started. In particular, I have no idea what "A fresh start for experienced users." means. The description seems very far afield from conveying the idea of a minimalist, basic, Drupal install.

I agree with @keith.smith. By the time the user gets to reading the fine print, they need the detail that is in there now. Our goal here should just be to make the rest of the page clear enough so that most users don't bother stopping to read the fine print.

So I would leave the descriptions exactly as they are currently, and only change the profile names:

• Standard
• ???

(Note that this patch would require some tweaks to the drupal_install_profile_name() function, though, since the profile names are used on other pages besides this one, and often in contexts where you do want the word "Drupal" in there somewhere...)

For ??? I'd tentatively go with "Expert" or "For advanced users", since of the choices listed above, those are the only ones that will sufficiently scare away first time users, and that's our main goal. Not sure which is better - anything with the word "advanced" is a little dangerous because people might be afraid that if they don't choose it they are missing out on some advanced functionality that they might later want on their site. I don't think it should be "Basic" though, because it seems like that's too easily confused with "Standard".

• Standard - New to Drupal? Choose this one.
o Expert - A fresh start for experienced users.

I agree that Standard and Basic don't really differentiate enough.
Expert sound good. 'Advanced' implies 'more', which isn't the case. Expert implies 'know what you are doing' which is what should be communicating.

So I like the labels, however the descriptions are indeed not very informative. We might consider for Expert just saying what it is, an install with few modules and defaults enabled.

Good suggestion. I'd like to keep the 'clean start' as well though. Until this issue I was under the impression the Expert one was not meant for me, where it actually is. So I think it needs to communicate something along the lines of 'For experts, but not programmers only.' Anyway…

• Standard - New to Drupal? Choose this one.
o Expert - A clean start, only a few modules enabled.

• Standard - New to Drupal? Choose this one.
o Expert - Configure your own.

Building off #18, and reading through this issue after a long time not having seen it, it seems to me that the keywords to emphasize are:

• Standard: pre-configured
• Expert: maximum control

I really like "• Standard - New to Drupal? Choose this one."

how about:

• Expert - Start from scratch.

Nate (who is sitting next to me) says (roughly):

"99% of people are going to pick Standard; it shouldn't imply it's only for new people."

"Expert doesn't give you more options, it gives you fewer; should something more like "Bare bones"

Right. Also, implying that Standard is THE ONE for new people might not be good because someone might create a contrib profile that is aimed even more at beginners than this one is, and then the descriptions would conflict...

I think this would be fine?

• Standard: "Create a Drupal site with the most commonly used features pre-installed."
• Expert: "Start fresh, with only a few modules enabled."

In other words, keep the descriptions more or less as they were before, with some slight tweaks to the second one based on @yoroy's ideas.

Again, I think the key thing here is the profile names - the descriptions are really nice and informative as they are and I don't think they were the cause of the problem, so there's really no need to totally rewrite them. The main goal here was to make things clear for beginners -- and if the profiles are renamed to "Standard" and "Expert", I'm pretty sure people who are trying Drupal for the first time will realize pretty quickly that Expert is not the one they're supposed to choose :)

I really liked "start from scratch" but then realized it can be interpreted as starting from scratch experience-wise. Which makes it mean the same as option 1. Hmm. maybe adding 'building' prevents that.

I do think we should keep the beginner angle for Standard, at least until we can be more specific about what actually is in that profile, what kind of site it's geared towards. And, it kind of makes it a trigger to try out the Expert profile once you get confronted with this a couple of times. Which is good, because as I mentioned above, I now realize that Expert is a much more feasible option earlier on the learning curve than I previously thought, even for non-dev. I had always assumed the Expert profile was basically broken untill you added some of your own code. So I think using 'New to Drupal?' is a nice little nag.

• Standard - New to Drupal? Choose this one.
o Expert - Start building from scratch.

• Standard - Ready to go.
o Expert - Start building from scratch.

I know there's no patch, but let's try and agree on something, yes?

What about

Standard: Pre-assembled installation package. (or similar)
Expert: Assemble your own.

This might give the user the idea of how much work would be involved after installation is complete.

That only uses more difficult wording without being any more specific. Installation time is not the moment to estimate the amount of work (to what?).

Keep it simple, omit needless words and provide only just enough info to help people make a choice. that's all we need to do here.

What if we focused more on what's *in* the profile, and what it can do (see Gallery2 below):

So maybe for us:

• Typical - Basic Drupal, xx themes, and xx modules. Blogs, forums, blah blah blah.
o Minimal - Just the basic "core" Drupal Modules and Garland Theme.
o Full - Basic Drupal, xx themes, and xx modules. Everything we got!

Gallery2

Typical - The base application, 8 themes and a selection of popular modules. Enough to satisfy the demands of most Gallery users.

Full - The base application, 9 themes and 70 modules. Every cool feature we've got.

Minimal - The base application, 2 themes and 3 graphics toolkits. Everything you need to publish photos, and nothing more.

Developer - Same as the full package, except it includes all the developer tools so that you can work on improving the code. 

http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery2:Download#Packages

Notes on how others do it:
Wordpress, Joomla, Moodle, OpenOffice, phpBB3 have one "full install"

Winamp

Pro / USD 19.95  /   File size: 13.1 MB 	
Bundle (limited time)  /   FREE + Bonus MP3 Detroit by Black Gold     / File size: 15 MB 	
Full /  FREE     /  File size: 9.4 MB

Windows Vista :-)

Home Basic
Home Premium
Business
Ultimate

The first person to suggest we rename the "Drupal" install profile to the "Drupal Ultimate" install profile gets a punch in the eye. ;)

The Gallery 2 descriptions, minus the useless information about how many themes, etc. are installed, actually look pretty good. Maybe even just renaming them to "Typical" and "Minimal" would be enough.

The only typical Drupal install is the one with added contrib :-) but "minimal" is very good.

• Standard - Ready to go.
o Minimal - Start building from scratch.

I like standard and minimal.

We could expand the descriptions a bit though. "Ready to go" and "Starting from scratch" are colloquialisms (like cliche's), and ambiguous. For non-native english speakers they are confusing.

What about:

Standard: Configure your Drupal site with the most commonly used modules. Fastest start!
Minimal: Configure your Drupal site with fewest possible modules. Requires customization.

Actually, the original patch looks great. I just wanted to bring up the Gallery2 configuration.

Mike

Just installed head and was annoyed to see this still isn't fixed.

@MichaelCole: your version basically re-introduces the problem we're trying to fix, using the same words in each description and they are too long. How is 'most commonly used modules' any more specific or more understandable? (and I am a non-native English speaker, are you?)

I like requires customization though

• Standard - Ready to go.
o Minimal - Requires customization.

Again, watching the video that is posted at the beginning of this issue, here is my interpretation of what I saw:

1. First they glanced over the page and were confused about which profile to install.
2. Then they read the detailed descriptions underneath more carefully.
3. Based on what they read, they picked the "correct" one.

Our objective in this issue is to fix point 1 - make it so they don't even have to read the detailed descriptions if they don't want to. Making the detailed descriptions less descriptive is not going to help (and probably will hurt, IMO) and also runs great risk of bikeshedding :)

So here is a patch that implements the changes I suggested in #22 -- I think that is the least controversial suggestion that has been proposed here, and it should completely solve the problem shown in the video. Also, it gets all the necessary "code" changes out of the way, so that when William Shakespeare comes along to our issue queue and writes us the perfect descriptions, he will only have to submit a one-line followup patch :)

Screenshots are also attached; note that the patch changes things so that in subsequent screens after the first one, "Drupal" is used rather than the profile name (although an individual install profile can override this if it wants to). Comparing the old and new screenshots, I think this is definitely an improvement - putting "Drupal (minimal)" on this screen doesn't make a whole lot of sense (and with the new profile names, it would make even less sense). This change reinforces the idea that regardless of which profile you choose, you aren't making any final, irreversible decisions - you still get Drupal at the end.

Also, regarding use of the word "Expert", I originally thought it might be too scary too, but then recently I had an experience which convinced me that at least as things currently are, we definitely want to scare people away from using it, even if they are no longer 'beginners':

I was installing the expert profile to test a patch, and got very confused about why the "Add new content" link wasn't showing.

It took me several seconds of thinking about it before I realized that because the expert profile doesn't come with any content types at all, the only way I could get that link to appear was to go to the content types page and create a new content type. This wasn't intuitive at all for me, so personally I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to use the expert profile right now unless they (a) consider themselves to be at least some kind of expert, or (b) are curious enough to try anyway :)

I chimed in before, but indeed "Expert" seems more descriptive than minimal which might say that drupal core standard is not minimal (while it really kinda is).

Care to say, that I don't see much use in this expert profile being in core.

Care to say, that I don't see much use in this expert profile being in core.

An interesting point, since anyone who would want to use it likely already knows how to download and install stuff from contrib....

However, I am pretty sure there are good "political" reasons for putting it in - Drupal is, after all, a site building tool, so by default it should have something that caters to the hardcore site builders too. Also, having it there makes it much easier to get patches in that do interesting things with the default install profile, since it doesn't give off the impression that those interesting-but-optional features are being "forced" on people who don't want them.

Anyway, if you want to roll back the entire expert profile, please create a separate issue for that :) Even if the expert profile were to be taken out of core, 95% of my above patch is still relevant and worth doing, IMO.

double check…

Have been giving this some thought and hope people won't mind my adding my opinion - this is on the basis that I think that for a lot of people this is the very first page they will see (no prior knowledge, nothing - just a tweet that said: "RT @dries Drupal rocks! - download here".

Current setup:

Select an installation profile

Reaction: Huh? What is an installation profile? - Will this have consequences on things like what type of db, etc I should use?

* Drupal
Create a Drupal site with the most common used features pre-installed.

Reaction: do I want this? should I go ahead?

* Drupal (minimal)
Create a Drupal site with only required modules enabled.

Reaction: maybe this is better? I like clean installations...

Suggestion:

Select what Drupal functionality (installation profile) you would like to start off with
---

* Drupal
Create a Drupal site with the most commonly used features pre-installed.
(Ideal for those new to Drupal - gets you started with most of what Drupal can do out of the box)

* Drupal (minimal)
Create a Drupal site with only required modules enabled.
(Ideal if you want to start bare-bones and enable additional functionality as required)

---

"Start off with" indicates that you can change things later on (without explicitly saying it).

"Functionality" indicates that this is about the end result not about whether one might lead to you needing PHP 5 and the other PHP 4...

You give new users a pointer about what to click on - the first one is ideal for them.

I think the text should be geared to new Drupal users - experienced users know what they want and they want read anything anyway. So the second one caters to the demanding newbie in that it says this will get you going basic but you can change things later on.

I realise it is a bit verbose but I don't this that's necessarily a bad thing.

Anything that uses Drupal in both is not acceptable imo. See #2.

We're back to square one with these. Way too much text, lots of redundant wording, even using parentheses and only there the real differentation starts. Verbose *is* a bad thing, especially in interface copy writing: don't make me think.

Keep it simple, omit needless words and provide only just enough info to help people make a choice. that's all we need to do here.

'Standard' as the label for the first one is kind of agreed on in the prior comments, for the second profile, it's either 'Minimal' or 'Expert', of which I'm leaning to 'Expert' for the same reasons as mentioned in #36 and #37.

• Standard - Ready to go.
o Expert - Requires customization.

(though Standard requires customization, too)

or

• Standard - Ready to go.
o Expert - Build from scratch.

Are the two best candidates so far. And supersize the font-size on the first one…

Hmm, if verbose is no good then a way forward may be to have two tiers:

------
Install drupal

Standard configuration - ready to go

or select an alternative profile

• minimal
• open atrium
• my custom profile
---------

Standard nice and bold the rest de-emphasized

this way no confusing terminology is used straight away newbies have a clear path and experts know where to look anyway

There's a lot of great consideration going on here, though not a lot of consensus. I don't know if I can synthesize all the ideas, but I hope my opinions aren't beating a dead horse.
I'll start with why I wouldn't choose some of the options:

I would avoid "Ready to go." Ready to go where? Drupal has no specific intended use case.

Anyway, "Standard" is pretty well agreed upon here, (as yoroy said in #43.) I don't think it needs an addendum at all. Standard is understood. Standard is 95%. It's what you want. Just plain "Standard."

I prefer "Start from scratch" to "Start fresh." The latter implies that the standard install is non-fresh? "From scratch" implies more work needs to be done: that's what we want to imply.
In general, though, I think we're better off avoiding colloquialisms, (as MichaelCole suggested,) because: they're imprecise, and we're not portraying this fun and informality in the rest of the system.

I would avoid "require customization": both methods will require customization.

I would avoid "Basic" because the word connotes "Easier".

So...

In #43, yoroy said it's either "Minimal" or "Expert." There have been arguments for both.
Maybe we can settle on including them both?

• Standard
o Minimal - for Experts

(Almost like yoroy's #2, just without "Developers.")

It's been said that "Experts" is too strong, but "Advanced" sets the bar too low. We could use "Advanced Drupal Users". Many folks tend to consider themselves advanced computer users; make the domain specific. Like catch said in #4 - "not that scary to put off the semi-adventurous," but throwing a warning flag:

• Standard
o Minimal - for advanced Drupal users

I think that being an "advanced user" means different things to different people.

For example, someone that has been using drupal from the administrative side for a year, might think of himself as an advanced user, but if he choose the expert profile, would be quickly reinstalling and choosing the other option, most probably.

In my opinion, thinking of what usually helps get an idea of what the difference is between such options, it would be nice to give an example use for each, briefly, since the term "developer" doesn't seem to be making progress in this thread.

What those example use cases for each profile might be difficult to get an agreement on, given the flexibility of drupal itself. Yet it might help to think in that direction to get a clearer description for the end user.

Maybe even listing what modules will be installed for each case would help also? I don't see why we should keep it really short... we could add such information below the main description, to help users figure out what is going on.

Comments from a newbie (or relative newbies) and after discussion across the table at the documentation sprint in Paris...

1. Basic means different things to different people. To an absolute newbie BASIC INSTALLATION means what I would start with whereas ADVANCED INSTALATION would imply for the advanced Drupal user. To a developer basic means more like minimal - hence he arguement.

2. More ideally, there was more agreement to move away from BASIC and to use the words Standard and Minimal as is already being used at present.

Standard Installation
Minimal Installation

I think its more useful to give a list of what will be installed and not to use any other text (basic or advanced or experienced) as that would result in a war on semantics. (User of drupal vs. administrator vs. developer... etc and what any of these people may think)

Hope this thread eventually comes to some conclusion!

'installation' is redundant.

So we seem to agree on Standard and Minimal. Do we really need more info here? 'Standard' very clearly indicates 'you probably want this one'. Do we need to add further explanation about Minimal here at all?

• Standard
o Minimal

If you go back and watch the original video that was posted to start off this issue, isn't "Minimal" the exact word that tripped them up???

Honestly, I like yoroy's "• Standard - Ready to go. / o Expert - Build from scratch." from #43. I'm slightly worried that "scratch" may be a difficult concept to translate.

As a Dutch translator (who's English is fairly good) I have no problems with understanding nor translating this string.

Thanks sutha. I asked around in the German IRC channel as well and, besides some hair-splitting of course, feedback was that this was certainly translatable.

Maybe a patch helps

Ehm… how to override the alphabetical sort?

Having it all in the name itself may not be such a good idea after all, this looks a bit weird.

Updated patch, needs review for testbot but still needs fixing the sorting to get 'Standard' listed before 'Expert'.

once more

Three things...

1. I'd guess that testbot fails installing HEAD because this patch changes the name of the profile it tries to install.

2. In install.php, install_select_profile_form() alphabetically sorts profiles...

  // Display radio buttons alphabetically by human-readable name.
  natcasesort($names);

Maybe Core could identify its own install profiles and assign them weights? -- All contrib would follow, alphabetically... Maybe core and contrib profiles should be separated?

3. On the "Installing..." page, I think it should still say that we're installing Drupal... "Installing Drupal: Advanced" instead of "Installing Advanced"

Let's go with "Standard" and "Minimal." This seems to be the consensus from the UX team. Standard definitely needs to come first, though.

Jeff's idea at #61 bullet 2 of putting core's profiles in front makes sense to me, at this stage. Maybe in D8 we can introduce an ability to weight install profiles.

We will probably need to call in boombatower about the fact that testing bot chokes and dies on this patch. My understanding is that it's easier to change the installation process now with PIFR2.

Hm, those technical issues were essentially all addressed already by my patch in #34. Let's please go back to that.

Attached is a simple reroll of that patch, updated to work with the latest D7. Other changes are:

1. Using "Minimal" rather than "Expert". If that's the consensus, then OK, but I again want to point out the irony that the video which started this issue shows that the word "minimal" was the main point of confusion. This is a quote from Leisa in that video:
   

   I think that even though you might think that "minimal" means easy, in this case, the "most commonly used" is the trick [to figuring out the correct profile to choose].

   So the attached patch does keep "minimal", but there's no way in the world I'm rolling a patch that removes "most commonly used" from the other description at the same time :)

2. Fixes the sorting so that both core profiles are pulled to the top of the list (rather than only pulling the default profile to the top, like the patch in #34 did). I guess that makes sense, since you probably don't want "Minimal" appearing randomly in the middle of the rest of your alphabetical list.

   I'm a bit uneasy about this hardcoding of the profile order, though. This page is almost literally the only page in all of Drupal that cannot be altered without hacking core, and we are forcing the core stuff to the top of the list with no way to change it :) However, the code introduced by the patch does make provisions for Drupal distributions that want to completely delete the core profiles (i.e., it deliberately does not assume that those profiles even exist when doing the reordering).

3. As in #34, introduces the concept of a "distribution name" which can be (optionally) defined by an install profile - the distribution name is completely independent of the profile name itself. That way the installer defaults to still saying things like "Installing Drupal" on the progress page, rather than "Installing Standard" which makes no sense. I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the testbot failure, and that the attached patch will work with no testbot changes needed, but I guess we'll find out...

Some screenshots.

David: thank you!

re: 1. I'd argue they started fussing about what minimal might mean because both profiles are named Drupal which forced them to look for the differention in the description. 'Standard' should take that confusion away for the most part. It also implies 'Minimal' is non-standard. That way I don't think we need to rely on the descriptions that much anymore.

Yeah, contrasting it with "Standard" will definitely help.

However, someone who is new to Drupal and has heard all the "Drupal is aimed at developers" stuff could also assume that Standard is aimed at the developers, and Minimal is for people like them who want a simpler version.... but hopefully that won't happen :)

Oke, code reviews please!

Wait, why -what hmm.

-  // Display radio buttons alphabetically by human-readable name.
+  // Display radio buttons alphabetically by human-readable name, but always
+  // put the default and expert profiles first (in that order).
   natcasesort($names);
+  if (isset($names['expert'])) {
+    $names = array('expert' => $names['expert']) + $names;
+  }
+  if (isset($names['default'])) {
+    $names = array('default' => $names['default']) + $names;
+  }
 
   foreach ($names as $profile => $name) {

we might want to document exactly what and why we're doing this here.

OK, this expands the code comment in that area, as well as fixes a typo in another code comment. No other changes.

Rerolled to chase HEAD (no other changes).

Thanks David. Couldn't help myself and tweak the descriptions a bit more, trying to use less words to communicate the same:

Grr.

I give up, attaching patch from #73 again

-name = Drupal
+name = Standard
 description = Install with common features pre-configured.

How did you make the patch in #76? Since the description field was changed, it should be two lines in the patch file (one with a - and one with a +); I think the fact that it isn't is why the patch doesn't apply. Editing the original default.info file and then auto-generating the patch file ought to work here.

The shorter text seems reasonable. Certainly "create a Drupal site" is not providing much new information and can reasonably be removed :)

Ah, true. Was manually editing your patch file. One more try…

Patch still applies and still works correctly - anyone think this is RTBC?

I've decided to commit this to HEAD.

I had written up a big long review and then lost it in a Firefox crash yesterday. The gist was that "name" vs. "distribution_name" strikes me as terribly confusing, and that we also don't call these things "distributions" anywhere in core (or on Drupal.org either, really) -- they're "installation profiles." Adding another name for something that has two name properties just seems ugh. :)

I asked Bojhan whether "Drupal (minimal)" or "Minimal Drupal" would fly and he said no. And when I took a closer look at the patch, I saw that this distribution_name would indeed only be monkeyed with by people actually building branded distributions, since everyone else will be fine calling their thing "Drupal". So I think this is good to go, and definitely an improvement over the current situation.

Now, we need a patch that renames these files so they match their human-readable names (will probably require svn/git/bzr). Setting back to "active." I have absolutely no idea what kind of chaos this is going to cause for testing bot, but I'm naively hoping that it is minimal. :P

Initial file renaming of default to standard and expert to minimal.

Left a random debugging statement in the last patch.

#85 was committed by webchick. I think this is what we need to turn qa back on.

Chx found another...

One more. We're running full tests locally to confirm this fixes it all.

Fix it properly this time...sigh...

#89 passes Bootstrap and Module (the fails we are trying to fix here). I can't do a full run locally due to having a slow mysqld.

Committed to HEAD. Thanks!

[Deleting my bogus comment. Was user error per below.]

I think you need to replace your Drupal installation with a completely fresh copy of the codebase. Those last two don't exist anymore.

Yes, those are old files that you should have removed when pulling in the new files (always a best practice).

Thank you. Yes, user error on my part. Very sorry!

Teeny tiny Drupal WTF here:

Shall we forget about it?

That wasn't caused by this issue - I'm pretty sure it said "Installed Drupal module" before the change :)

See: #689396: The install profile is sometimes referred to as a module during installation

Reopening this because of yoroy's comment in #96. I was just playing around with install profiles (Drupal 7 HEAD) and it's true that the last step of the installation is always "installed [profilename] module". [profilename] is replaced by whatever installation profile you're using. Try it out with the two profiles that Drupal comes with :)

I guess since there's this other issue at http://drupal.org/node/689396, it's safe to close this and discuss over there.

Reverting other fields changed in #99 and not reset in #100.