tcarmona's sandbox: Onboarding API

Onboarding is the process where site owners help new site members to orient themselves and take some important initial steps toward becoming full-fledged members of the site. This process is critical in various websites created with Drupal, as it smooths the user experience.

Whitney Hess wrote that "[m]ost companies think that getting people to sign up is the ultimate challenge, but what about getting them oriented to your site and actually using it? That process of helping people get started is called onboarding, and it’s crucial that you give it the attention it deserves."

The goal of this project is to build a flexible, configurable system for helping Drupal site owners build onboarding processes custom to their needs.

Examples of possible onboarding actions for a conference website, for example, include:
- Buy your ticket
- Buy some training
- Fill in your profile
- Submit sessions
- Vote on sessions
- Submit bofs
- Vote on bofs
- Find other people who have similar profile fields
- etc.

The Onboarding module would consist of two parts. An API through which other modules can define onboarding "actions" and a UI through which the site administrators can order and arrange a number of onboarding flows. In this initial proposal, the API would have a simple checker if the user already did this action or not, and store it in the database. Also, this project will contain a simple UI, that will enable/disable each "action" and set each action to a role. A rough sketch of that part of the Onboarding UI might look like:

In a nutshell, this project have the goal to create a simple API to enable websites to taught users how to use it. It would be an awesome feature to Drupal, as many users complain that Drupal has a rough learning curve, so with something to teach the users, this problem would be solve.