"Easy Mode" Drupal One-Click Install

I think the "Easy Mode" Drupal One-Click Installer is an extremely useful feature provided by Dreamhost. It allows many non-technical users to quickly start using a first class Content Management System like Drupal very quickly.

I'm a Dreamhost customer that's been using Drupal 5 (hand-installed) for over a year now (see http://birken.ca), and I'm very excited about the prospect of using the Easy Mode Drupal 6 instead. This is because it's a huge bonus for Dreamhost to be doing the behind-the-scenes updating (especially Security Updates) and upgrading for me. Yes, there would be a loss in freedom to install my own themes and modules, but for me to not have to do any ongoing OS-level System Administration of Drupal is well worth it (as I represent a non-profit organization, and future maintainers of our website are highly unlikely to be as technically skilled in Debian and Linux System Administration as I am).

Hand-installing Drupal was not easy, and I am a seasoned pro at such things (I have B. Sc. in Computer Science, and 5 years experience as a Unix/Linux System Administrator.) It originally took me upwards of 20 hours to get Drupal hand-installed (including installing additional modules and tweaking many settings to sane states once Drupal was installed). With the "Easy Mode" Drupal Installation, I got to this same "sane state" in only 2 hours, a 10x savings in time (with infinitely less stress)!

So I want to give Dreamhost a big kudos for making this possible, and I forsee future Dreamhost customers going absolutely bananas with excitement over this extremely unique and powerful feature. In my opinion, this will become THE defacto way to get a new, highly "geek-compliant" website up and running easily, in a very, very cost-effective manner (with very low ongoing maintenance).

I'm curious to hear comments from fellow Dreamhost customers and staff (involved in developing and maintaining the "Easy Mode" Drupal). I'd especially like to hear: how committed Dreamhost is to moving this Beta program forward?

I've set up an easy-mode Drupal install, so I can get a feel for what I can and cannot do (since SSH/Debian filesystem access is not available in the "Easy Mode" Drupal). So far I'm very impressed at all the Drupal features I can access (having invested so little effort).

I'm also very curious to hear from Dreamhost developers as to which Drupal 6 modules (and other features) they plan to make available next to all those who have done "Easy Mode" Drupal installs like me. Is there an RSS Feed somewhere (besides this forum) where I can keep tabs on that?

I know that many common, highly useful Drupal modules still aren't quite ready for the recently-released Drupal 6. The major one I'm dying to be able to use within "Easy Mode" Drupal is TinyMCE:
http://drupal.org/project/tinymce

(...or some other equivalent WYSIWYG inline HTML editor:
FCKeditor: http://drupal.org/project/fckeditor
)

As of Jun 21st, 2008, here are the modules you get with your Drupal 6.2 "Easy Mode" install:

Aggregator 6.2 Aggregates syndicated content (RSS, RDF, and Atom feeds).
Blog 6.2 Enables keeping easily and regularly updated user web pages or blogs.
Blog API 6.2 Allows users to post content using applications that support XML-RPC blog APIs.
Book 6.2 Allows users to structure site pages in a hierarchy or outline.
Color 6.2 Allows the user to change the color scheme of certain themes.
Comment 6.2 Allows users to comment on and discuss published content.
Contact 6.2 Enables the use of both personal and site-wide contact forms.
Content translation 6.2 Allows content to be translated into different languages.
Database logging 6.2 Logs and records system events to the database.
Forum 6.2 Enables threaded discussions about general topics.
Help 6.2 Manages the display of online help.
Locale 6.2 Adds language handling functionality and enables the translation of the user interface to languages other than English.
Menu 6.2 Allows administrators to customize the site navigation menu.
OpenID 6.2 Allows users to log into your site using OpenID.
Path 6.2 Allows users to rename URLs.
PHP filter 6.2 Allows embedded PHP code/snippets to be evaluated.
Ping 6.2 Alerts other sites when your site has been updated.
Poll 6.2 Allows your site to capture votes on different topics in the form of multiple choice questions.
Profile 6.2 Supports configurable user profiles.
Search 6.2 Enables site-wide keyword searching.
Statistics 6.2 Logs access statistics for your site.
Syslog 6.2 Logs and records system events to syslog.
Taxonomy 6.2 Enables the categorization of content.
Throttle 6.2 Handles the auto-throttling mechanism, to control site congestion.
Tracker 6.2 Enables tracking of recent posts for users.
Trigger 6.2 Enables actions to be fired on certain system events, such as when new content is created.
Update status 6.2 Checks the status of available updates for Drupal and your installed modules and themes.
Upload 6.2 Allows users to upload and attach files to content.

These are the "core required" Drupal modules you get:

Block 6.2 Controls the boxes that are displayed around the main content.
Filter 6.2 Handles the filtering of content in preparation for display.
Node 6.2 Allows content to be submitted to the site and displayed on pages.
System 6.2 Handles general site configuration for administrators.
User 6.2 Manages the user registration and login system.

These are the themes you get:

-Bluemarine
Table-based multi-column theme with a marine and ash color scheme.

-Chameleon
Minimalist tabled theme with light colors.

-Garland
Tableless, recolorable, multi-column, fluid width theme (default).

-Marvin
Boxy tabled theme in all grays.

-Minnelli
Tableless, recolorable, multi-column, fixed width theme.

-Pushbutton
Tabled, multi-column theme in blue and orange tones.

Is there any chance of getting the CCK and Views modules? These are considered by the Drupal community to be practically core modules.

They might be "practically" core, but until just recently there were so many issues against them with 6.x that I didn't want to go near them. That's not saying anything bad about the modules themselves. I'm just saying that at this point I don't think those particular modules are ready for experienced users, let alone for someone more inclined to use an Easy Mode install.

It's taken a long time for modules to be brought up to 6.x. I started my research on Drupal just when v6 was being introduced, so I'm no "long time uberdruper". But rather than loading v5 and dealing with an old release I opted to start with v6 and just accept/learn new modules as they become available. Since some modules still aren't ready (especially some of the bigger ones) and some won't be moved forward at all, I think this has been a good position.

Just today we installed our first multi-site installation of Drupal here at DH. I expect to do many more and then move to PS to get better performance. For anyone concerned with the learning curve, yeah, there's no doubt that this is an investment. If all you want is a simple website then stick with Easy Mode. If you're the type of person who likes to customize and add more features to things then maybe you can go Easy and then do a full install later. You don't need to go production - we've been running test environments for months now as we get the hang of handling this beast.

As I get more comfortable with the environment I'm starting to take part in the Drupal community a bit more. I've volunteered to look at docs for a couple projects, I'm reporting issues and doing fix testing for a couple others. That's the spirit of Open Source - you give what you can and hope that it balances with what you take. I've posted some notes in a new blog I started at the LA Drupal group (which they're talking about disbanding): http://ladrupal.org/blog/starbuck - my second posting there has a TON of links to good info. Go through just some of that and you'll be well on your way. I'm "Starbuck" in at Drupal.org too, if you happen to see me there.

So anyway, I hope that helps someone who's on the fence about Drupal. We're confident that we made the right decision for our business. I'm only concerned with two things with regard to Drupal. One is with performance issues as we add more modules, but that' what the PS is about. The other is that as we add more modules we're also taking on more responsibility for reporting bugs, doing testing, etc - if we just leave it all up to someone else then we'll never get what we want out of this, so I can easily see paying people at some point to make fixes that we need and then contributing them back to the community. Again, that's what FLOSS is about, but this is where we realize that nothing is really "free". You pay with time, money, frustration, and/or just not getting things just the way you want, but you're going to pay in some way. Knowing that up front seems to helps the process, and it's one of the key factors that's made me more of a DIY type than an Easy Mode type. YMMV

Regards - S

[(2) What's the thoughts about adding some Drupal advertising modules (especially ones supporting AdSense) to "Easy Mode" collection?] as it's seeming I & others could really use these --see & reply to the thread at
http://discussion.dreamhost.com/showflat.pl?Cat=0&Board=3rdparty&Number=109399&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=14&part=

And in regards to DreamHost admin handling it for us, "Easy Mode" is now is telling me it needs security fix installed :-) --see & reply at http://discussion.dreamhost.com/showflat.pl?Cat=0&Board=3rdparty&Number=109401&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=14&part=&vc= Thanks!