If there's one thing that science has proven to me it's this: my girlfriend loves stuffed animals. I guess that's why I thought it would be a good idea for us to go to Build-A-Bear. By this point you should have stopped to wonder why I decided to post this under the "Drupal." My reasoning: A few days ago Adrian wrote "A Smallcore Manifesto: Help Us Build a Better Teddy Bear." Using the analogy of Drupal as a Teddy-Bear, he pointed out that by default, the tarball of Drupal is like a prebuilt teddy bear. Though it serves its purposes, there's many times when it would be better to just "design our own", replacing components of Drupal with other components that we deem more desirable. (I know this wasn't Adrian's main point, but this is what started my train of thought.)
It feels like there are components of this same idea within the move to package install profiles. For instance, if we wanted Drupal to act like pastebin, then we could simply download the DrupalBin archive which would contain everything that we need to be able to run it. Overall, that seems like a fair way to do things. Though the monolithic nature of the system doesn't quite excite my personality, it's still a very valid way to work. So time for the obvious questions: What does this have to do with teddy bears and Drupal?! Are you completely ADD?! Though the packaged install profiles idea has merit, we're still distributing ready-made teddy bears. We've got more to choose from now, but they're still ready-made.
When Jenna walked in to Build-A-Bear, there was something I noticed: she looked at the premade bears only briefly. She had her own ideas about what her bear needed to be (if a bear at all!) She examined all of the skins and all of the outfits. She looked at every accessory. She was very intent on making the bear that she wanted. Even though they offered several different kinds of prebuilt bears they had no way of knowing what she was wanting in advance. (Yes, I still realize this isn't what Adrian was saying. It's what he made me think of though.) "Install profiles as distribution" just looks like another line of ready made teddys.
If I'm going to critique an idea I should at least have a suggestion, right? Instead of distributing premade bears, regardless of the number offered, it might be better for us to distribute a teddy bear builder. The idea came from the FireStats project, or to be more precise, the FireStats Installer. It contains a few small files that download and setup the application itself. Borrowing this concept...
The Teddy Bear Installer (as I call it) is my answer for installing Drupal. Ideally, it would consist of only a few files. One could simply place it somewhere on the webserver and visit it in a web browser (almost identical to the FireStat Installer so far...) How would this be useful (or even different from installing Drupal) though? By itself, it isn't. What if we augment the idea with a server containing a catalog of Drupal modules, themes, and locales? Well now we have a few more possibilities:
- We can run the installer in any supported language. Simply download the locale before continuing.
- We can provide a list of premade "bears" to choose from. (Newspaper, forum, blog, community planning, photo gallery, minimal, default, etc...)
- You could start with a premade bear, but customize it to better fit your needs (add Views, remove PathAuto, change themes, etc...)
- No all included information would have to live on drupal.org. The catalog would simply need to know about it. (Want themes from another site? Want to directly include FCKEditor?)
- We could use any version of any module we want (even devel or direct from CVS HEAD.)
- We could better present competing modules. (Want a forum? We have 6 to choose from... Here are the pros and cons.)
- By rating the modules within the catalog, users who are freshly installing could get a better idea of which route to take. (Also, think suggestions.)
- We could use the same installer to install almost any version of Drupal.
- We wouldn't have to spend the time / space / processing power to rebuild our bears everytime a module was upgraded.
I know the idea isn't perfect (and some of the items on the list could still be done through the monolithic method), I just wonder it it might make it easier to build our perfect bear. In any case, I think we all agree that we'd like to design our own bear. (In case you're wondering, Jenna decided not to get a bear that time. None of them quite fit her tastes. And no, that doesn't relate to Drupal, and yes, I might be ADD.)
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