By chx on

Drupal has been criticized a lot for being "hard to install". As far back as the beginning of 2004, Adrian Rossouw began to work on the installer system (see Install system - requirements and Drupal install system) and after a lot of work by the fine CivicSpaceLabs folks (Kieran Lal, Jeremy Andrews, Nedjo Rogers, Angie Byron and others), Karoly Negyesi took over the patch this June. A month of further development (with quite some help from Jeff Eaton and, again, lots others), saw Steven Wittens taking the torch on July 12 and finally, on July 13, the biggest and most often requested improvement to Drupal core got committed!

However, this patch is more than just usability: it supports "install profiles" so that anyone can create a distribution out of Drupal core, contributed modules, and themes. This will begin a new era in Drupal's life. Without a doubt, there will be a Drupal for blogger distribution, and a forum distribution is already in the works. Also, new installations of Drupal will only contain database tables for the modules you've actually enabled.

But that's not the only thing the next version of Drupal will have:

  • The admin/settings page has been reworked.
  • Each module has its own directory like those in the contributed modules repository. Already many have an .install file which contains the database script to load its tables. There are many plans on how to utilize this new directory structure, like having dependency metadata, individual help files for every module, splitting up drupal.css, and more.
  • XML-RPC extensions (System.multiCall and System.methodSignature) now work.
  • You can add roles when adding a user as an admin' no need for an additional "edit" step.
  • Aggregator now uses RSS 2.0's guid if present to prevent duplicate posts being inserted.
  • Cache handling has been moved to its own file. A backend which would cache to files and another which would utilize memcached is in the works.
  • As forms became highly customizable in 4.7 and links already in 4.8/5.0, so do become user emails now. You can use this to add a standard site footer to all outgoing emails, add special headers, or completely HTML-ize your messages.

Comments

ericatkins’s picture

ericatkins commented

I think this news is worthy of attention:

http://digg.com/programming/Drupal_will_have_an_install_system_(and_some_other_goods)

LateNightDesigner’s picture

LateNightDesigner commented

This is fantastic! I can see pre-made druapl installation downloads, and a profiles community where people can upload their setups for others to use. This really is a fantastic idea and a great opportunity to expand drupal designs and module installations, as well as offering a way for people to post a profile for support. Great!

The opportunity to offer more automation as well is really great. I can see web developers with pre-created profiles allowing people to Click/Buy an auto-install and getting an account setup on a shared host in minutes with modules and template choice all set up and ready to go.

This really is a fantastic opportunity for Drupal and it's community, and will raise Drupal to the top of any CMS list.

I have druaplprofiles.com and drupaldistros.com, I'd love to setup a community for profile downloading. I'm sure someone already started, so I'd be more than happy to just point the domains. If not, let's get something rolling!

//---------------------------------------
Latenightdesigners.com- Giving IMD a Fighting Chance

codexmas’s picture

codexmas commented

I usually do quick installs of drupal for testing purposes.
The installer works great!

My testing environment is a LAMPP/WAMPP setup where the mysql main
user is root and the password is blank.

The password field on the installer is required.

A workaround I used is to create a full permission user and standard testing
password.

Might be nice if the password field was not required for testing purposes.

No big deal, thought I would mention it as I have used a few other installers
for other PHP systems that didn't require the password for that reason.

Kudo's for getting this going so soon!

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

I have to disagree with that. Testing without a required component means some things don't get tested until very late in the cycle. It's inconvienient at times, but I have seen to many issues where things were fine until the password required part was put back in and then it all came apart.

Most issue's were generally around proper interaction with the authentication stuff true (forgot to put something in, etc), but if you start with a production like environment, then you got to keep the password so you end with a production requirement. I think XAMMP and company missed it wiht not reuiring a password in their install.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
commented

I noticed the blank db password recently in a 4.7 install - caused a PHP notice because $pass was undefined.

--
Ixis (UK): Drupal support, Drupal hosting.

peteThomas’s picture

peteThomas commented

A user-friendly install will help Drupal (typo3 and nuke benefitted greatly from install projects)

With the distro feature, perhaps now is a time to collect Drupal 'recipes' using tried-and-tested drupal ingredients (modules/templates/PHP snippets/DB tweaks/images/javasscript/templates) -

I'm gradually building one for academic publishing (see http://drupal.org/node/69912)

--> for Windows users needing an install today, google on drupal-on-a-stick is a great tool:
http://www.ratatosk.net/software/onastick

peteThomas’s picture

peteThomas commented

Just to mention that the drupal-on-a-stick project now has a distro-builder toolkit: Drupal-on-a-Stick Builder 1.1

kudos to morten at ratatosk

brashquido’s picture

brashquido commented

...and will certainly bring a lot of new users to Drupal. However, at the same time as making Drupal more accessable to users with little/no technical knowledge it will also expose them to other rather deep, but narrow holes in the Drupal UI/usability. Two that specifically come to mind are the process for deleting users and removing modules (or rather module content). Both of these tasks can produce orphaned content very easily that is impossible to correct without directly manipulating the database (i.e. impossible to correct through the Drupal UI). To me at least the process of deleting a user is so destructive to a Drupal environment, that I am really a little bit at odds as to why it is even there. That's a different story though...

Great work on the installer, I think the profiles option is a gem. Also very much looking forward to seeing how this memcached intergration works :) .
----------------
Dominic Ryan
www.it-hq.org

OpenChimp’s picture

OpenChimp commented

This is great news for drupal. I'm a huge fan, but configuring modules and initial setup is often a huge pain. Anyone know how we can start to set up these distribution profiles? Is there a tutorial or guide about this somewhere?

Thanks
Mikey