Where should site specific modules, themes and settings be kept?

I just read through all of the comments to date on #22336: Move all core Drupal files under a /core folder to improve usability and upgrades. I am against moving site files into webroot. To me, that just complicates things. Then the core/ directory will get lost in a sea of other stuff, reducing the benefits of having it in the first place.

All of my issues as a Drupal newbie (at least as they related to file paths) would have been solved if webroot contained two directories: core/ and sites/. That provides a very clear distinction between the core system (i.e. things I shouldn't touch) and the place where my websites go. All in all, this seems very intuitive.

I also don't think we need to hide the fact that Drupal supports multi-sites. So having sites/all/ and sites/default/ directories makes perfect sense. Again, moving sites/all/* into the root of sites/ would just cause confusion by mixing directories like themes/ and modules/ with directories for individual sites. I understand that this keeps the important site files deeper in the hierarchy, but that hierarchy exists for a reason. It makes it easy to find what you need, even if doing so requires a couple extra clicks.

If clarity is really what you're after, then I don't think changing the file structure is the key. Instead, I'd recommend adding a file at sites/README--about_sites.txt. This, more than anything else, would help newcomers to Drupal in getting their sites set up. This readme file could explain exactly what goes where in the sites directory, including for multi-site installations. It would duplicate much of the documentation in sites/default/default.settings.php, but that's a good thing. Newbies don't know to look in sites/default/default.settings.php for instructions. I sure didn't.

Hey, I was looking for this issue!

I think this is a great idea, personally. It would use the behaviour we currently don't like in Drupal 7 and below ("Oh, look! Here's a modules folder! Let me stick my modules in there!") to our learnability advantage. These ideas I'm pretty sure were already quicksketch's, but putting them here cos I couldn't find them documented anywhere else.

Picture the following:

That's the default directory structure. settings.php ships with a setting:

If you want to use multisite, then you change that variable to TRUE and add a "sites/" folder to the mix as well, which operates on the standard lookup pattern in 7.x and below. The difference is it doesn't do the 99% case thing *last* after it's already eliminated the other 30 possible options of where the $conf_path could be (Rasmus chided us for this in Szeged in 2008 and we still haven't fixed it).

I think the concern about the core directory getting lost is a bit overblown. We're only talking about 4 directories here in the default case, 5 if you're using multisite, and *possibly* an extra one if we chose to move docs like CHANGELOG.txt into a "docs/" directory for security hardening (separate issue plz).

Sounds good to me, does that mean that out of the box you can't do multi-site setups? It will be pretty similiair to how you make your site multi-site with wordpress