[development] Being noisy on installation...

[Nancy Wichmann]

Morbus Iff said:
>Congratulations, you're the first winner of the "We disagree on something, so therefore, everything said must be irrelevant!" award!
Hooray, I won something!

My statement was somewhat tongue-in-cheek (couldn't you read my smile in that message?).

If I followed that tack, I'd have been gone from Drupal long ago.  I disagree often with the "Drupal-gods" but I also find that I often come around to their thoughts eventually.

Yes, I have included a "module successfully installed" message in some of my modules.  This thread is making me rethink that, but with a view to how to improve the message, such as a "RTFM" link.  I will probably go back and revisit those modules.

Personally, I like the idea of a link to "administer" the module (going to the by-module page).  However, this does not cover all the bases all the time.  For example, there are taxonomy-based modules for which the first step should be to set up, or modify, a vocabulary - even before going to the settings pages.  For me, I find the easiest way to do my Coder reviews is via the module page; it would also be nice to link from there to the translation template extractor.  But now I hear the screaming about link bloat.

Being an "expert" may or may not help you with a module that simply does not function as you wish (but this could also be part of the problem).  However, it does mean that you are more likely to know to go the administer page, and how to find the vocabulary creation page along with it's terms, then how to make sure the permissions are correctly set, ... etc.  I've read many posts from people who don't know all these steps (yet).  There are many inexperienced Drupallers who haven't even thought of the idea of having multiple browser windows so they can flip from docs to admin pages and back again.

I do like the idea that was mentioned of a "step-by-step" add-on of some sort.  Perhaps the README.txt could evolve into this.  Of course we than have the problem of getting developers to actually use it.


Hmm, I just had a frightening thought: if we do things like this, some of us are going to make less money from supporting those inexperienced people...   Forget everything!  Let's make it even harder to figure out how to maintain Drupal.

Nancy E. Wichmann, PMP