Proposal: "Turn-key" Drupal initiative

Make a standard Drupal installation “ready to use” by including commonly required content types, blocks, views, and other components that most web sites require.

This differs from the Out of the Box initiative in that “Turn-key” Drupal will provide a starting point for site builders to extend and customize. The Umami Out-of-the-Box profile, by contrast, is meant to Demo Drupal without concern for experimental features or upgrade paths.

Problem/Motivation

Myself, along with some of my co-workers, were tasked by Dries to perform a series of interviews along with other research to try and determine what the main blockers are for Drupal 8 adoption, as well as what factors are leading to Drupal 8 being hard to use. (These findings will be part of the Driesnote at Nashville.)

We've talked to over 50 people at this point, from site builders, to developers, to support and sales people, to trainers, both enterprise-level and small-medium business level, from various points on the globe including North America, Europe, and India. From this research, we feel we've gleaned a solid set of common pain points and have some suggested next steps.

One huge need expressed among even very seasoned Drupal site builders, is core shipping with a "start building from here" profile, which contains common content types, site sections, and site features such as Media, Layouts, Workflow, etc. pre-configured out of the box, ready to go as a starting point for any Drupal site build. (Snowman, anyone? ;)) This opinionated, "Here's how you do Layouts in Drupal" approach would radically reduce Drupal's learning curve, Drupal's overall total cost of ownership, and not to mention cut down on the astronomical number of ways you can totally screw up a Drupal site from the get-go. :P

Umami focuses on providing an awesome demo experience, and eschews the idea of providing a starting point for site builders, along with upgrade paths and backwards compatibility and all this entails. Therefore, my understanding is the OOTB team would prefer Umami *not* be that starting point.

This means we need a new initiative, something more along the lines of "Standard Profile 2.0" — a default starting point for 80%+ of Drupal sites that takes into account all of the new functionality that's been added to core in the past 5+ years, and aims to provide a rock-solid foundation for building out sites, with automated tests, upgrade paths, and whatnot.

Proposed resolution

Make a standard Drupal installation “ready to use” by including commonly required content types, blocks, views, and other components that most web sites require.

What would come under this is a bit up in the air, and open for discussion. There are probably a few different approaches we could take:

• Attempt to craft Standard profile into a genuine starting point for 80% of sites; for example, ship with Blocks representing common site components such as a hero image, slideshow, social media share links. Expand the default set of content types (Blog posts? Press releases?) and add corresponding Views + landing pages utilizing Layouts. Add an "author" role w/ pre-set permissions. And so on.
• Make the use case instead a showcase of what Drupal can do, and pre-configure Layouts + Media + Workflow around sample content which explains how these features work. (Kind of the WordPress/Joomla! approach.)
• Make part of the installer a "wizard" that provides popular content type options to select during installation (populated by http://schema.org/?), sets up appropriate views + sample content accordingly. (This is much more involved, so would prefer it not to be a "phase 1" item)
• Start adding BC layers + an upgrade path to Umami and make Umami that "build your site from here" starting point.
• Probably other approaches as well.

Remaining tasks

• Open issue in ideas queue for public discussion period <= we are here! :)
• Come to agreement around what the finished product would look like.
• Identify coordinators(s) for this initiative, ideally with dedicated time.
• Get product management + framework management sign-off on idea
• (After that) Develop more detailed implementation plans, including biksehedding the implementation details (in other words, please don't delve into "solution A vs. solution B" details here... ;))

User interface changes

Yes. One or more of the following (or something else):

- Standard profile changes dramatically what's included out of the box.
- A new profile is added, around one of the above use cases.
- Umami loses all of the warnings, because it becomes a best-practice starting point.

API changes

Shouldn't be? We should be able to craft this around just what comes in core, these days.

Data model changes

Shouldn't be? We should be able to craft this around just what comes in core, these days.