People new to Drupal come to drupal.org and click on Get Started with Drupal. In
step one they can read:
Installation Profiles
Drupal Installation profiles are pre-packaged website solutions for specific use cases.
They include Drupal core as well as additional modules.
More Drupal 7 installation profiles will become available in the near future.
If that is the route they are interested in they will soon feel that Drupal is a broken mess when they
can't find an Installation Profile with a release in the last 3 months.
It's not for the lack of contributors trying either. They have projects available on d.o. but it's
not possible to do a release because of an issue that causes your .make file to be rejected. I'm
not sure if this (http://drupal.org/node/751242) issue is the hold up as there seem to be others
related.
All I know is that it's getting frustrating for contributors, and must be even worse for someone
new to Drupal and thinking an Installation Profile is the way to go. If we can't fix the problem maybe we
should edit Get Started with Drupal so they won't get a bad impression.
Comments
Related issues
Hear hear!
Here are more related issues.
Gábor directed me to the first one when I asked "is packaging even working at all?".
http://drupal.org/node/951978
http://drupal.org/node/751242 (the one you mentioned)
http://drupal.org/node/1105820
http://drupal.org/node/950018
yep.
yep.
Agreed
If we don't build profiles into drupal.org / core for D8, we should probably turn those sections off and focus on framework-y-ness.
All fixed
Sorry, I totally missed this thread. Weeks ago I finished fixing all these bugs (I think). Distro packaging should be working fine on d.o again. Apologies things were broken for so long. I'm clearly involved in too many things to do any of them well.
Cheers,
-Derek
Verified
Once I got my drupal-org.make file correct and committed, I got a successful build. Thanks Derek!
http://drupal.org/project/drupal_wiki
Version Status
There is still an issue with the Module Version Status. http://drupal.org/node/128601/release You can update your .make file after the build, but module versions will still appear to be out of date. Don't have a link to that handy at the moment.
Distro = Installation Profiles are a MUST for newbie
Hi,
I switched for years to Tikiwiki because Drupal was not offering enough functionalities (understand too complex for me to understand, code, test, ...).
Since I also want to use the CMS as a CMS and not only read doc, install, test, ...
I decided to switch back (strategical decision) and here are my impressions after a week of Drupal.
Drupal is still a FRAMEWORK (for me) where the simplest CMS problems did not find any answer after hours of doc reading:
1) How to link another page
2) How to include another page content
3) How to manage a collection of links (= Bookmarks)
I really need a CMS to document the Drupal possibilities, follow the module releases, ...
A Drupal installation really requires too much work to get some simple CMS functionality to work (problem/feature identification, lists all possible modules, check doc, tests whether working as expected, ...).
The best solution is therefore to use a Distribution = Installation Profile, since real specialists prepared it, which means that the distro should more or less be really usable.
But which distro? The ones which are listed in Drupal org or other ones like Cocomore (Core patched)?
My solution currently will be to will install different distributions.
I definitely do not want to mix the distro since I do not have any free time to "play" the developer (core version different, modules overlapping, ...). I just want to use a CMS so I installed different ones that I will use as I can.
May be later, I will have to mix the distro that I want to use... but not now!
The bad impression is here! Drupal seems to be like the IBM Systems: without an administrator and a few developers, it is not really a CMS for the normal human being.
Regards
Newbie might be discouraged
The release information for the Installation Profiles has been giving bogus information for some time now. I filed an issue http://drupal.org/node/1292388
The talk of moving some of core to contrib and Installation Profiles will mean this area will have to get a whole lot more love. :)
Which distro?
@JMC_in_CH: For a list with the main Drupal distributions (including categories: generic, academic, business, community, conservation, event, government, hosting, intranet, magazine, media, nonprofit, performance, social, video, etc.), see Additional distribution documentation.