After being a long time user of Umbraco now I hope this gets taken as intended and not as a slap in the face.
I've always struggled with installing Umbraco but I thought that was mainly due to be running it on XP Pro which was never the usual route. Now I'm on Win 7 though I'm still amazed at how hard it is to install on a clean machine. I do this of a living and it should be easier, a lot easier. If I'm doing something wrong then what about those new folk coming in behind us who are trying it out for the first time?
I'm not on about the very nice installed that the fine gents at Cog Works did here. It looks great. What I'm worried about is the technical knowledge and percieved size of the install.
Umbraco itself is quite small (about 8Mb I believe) but to install it on a clean machine I need to download over 0.5 Gb of applications. This makes it far from a quick win that you can have a play with over a lunch time. Surely to improve the number folk trying Umbraco for the first time we as a community (and HQ) should be making this initial introduction to Umbraco easy and at least give some feedback on why you have to install a mountain of stuff to get it running. Web Installer is no easy quick win, nor is going through the codeplex source either, not tried web matrix yet, why should I when I have and use VS every day?
Even when I have downloaded everything, restarted, downloaded some more, restarted, downloaded some more and done a final restart...I still need to know what the heck I'm doing technically to get it up and running. First point is asking me what my newly installed Databases admin password is. I have no idea, I've not even opened it, in fact I can't open it as SQL Server Management Studio is not installed by default so I've no way to even look tried leaving it blank but it errored, guess thats Microsofts new security tastic stance. Then there is the permission issues, no feed back at all on what those might be, you simply have to google for them ouch.
If you get through all this (and on my dev machine here I still have yet to) then you can set sites up pretty quickly. That point needs explaining to new users "sorry about the amount we need to install, this is a one time install, once up and running you'll be able to create new sites in a snap". I think it just needs a lot more hand holding with possible solutions to install problems. When I hit a YSOD in the browser I would be nice to have an idea of what the cause is without having to Google around the forums for 10 minutes.
So heres a challenge. Boot up a virtual machine with XP or Win 7 installed and try, just try, to install Umbraco and try to do it with fresh eyes. You're not allowed to click anything up front or second guess, just roll with the punches and see how hard it is. Now make some notes on what the issues are and how we could fix them. I'm no DB guru by a long way so there maybe some legit reasons for needing to know the "sa" password, there is probably a default password I don't know that I could put it (why not suggest that I try that on the install). If the password needs to be some horrid length and mix of characters to get around windows password paranoia tell me up front or show me how to disable it. Could we not try all the folders we need permissions on to ensure we have the right permissions?
All these little baby steps would really help get folk to the good stuff, Umbraco itself. Can we pull together to come up with some suggested solutions/high light problems and possible get involved with coding them up as a community?
Maybe having SQLCe as the default (which doesn't require admin passwords, and requires less setup) would be the way to go? That would simplify the process greatly for beginers who don't know much about setting up SQL server?
Improving the install experience
After being a long time user of Umbraco now I hope this gets taken as intended and not as a slap in the face.
I've always struggled with installing Umbraco but I thought that was mainly due to be running it on XP Pro which was never the usual route. Now I'm on Win 7 though I'm still amazed at how hard it is to install on a clean machine. I do this of a living and it should be easier, a lot easier. If I'm doing something wrong then what about those new folk coming in behind us who are trying it out for the first time?
I'm not on about the very nice installed that the fine gents at Cog Works did here. It looks great. What I'm worried about is the technical knowledge and percieved size of the install.
Umbraco itself is quite small (about 8Mb I believe) but to install it on a clean machine I need to download over 0.5 Gb of applications. This makes it far from a quick win that you can have a play with over a lunch time. Surely to improve the number folk trying Umbraco for the first time we as a community (and HQ) should be making this initial introduction to Umbraco easy and at least give some feedback on why you have to install a mountain of stuff to get it running. Web Installer is no easy quick win, nor is going through the codeplex source either, not tried web matrix yet, why should I when I have and use VS every day?
Even when I have downloaded everything, restarted, downloaded some more, restarted, downloaded some more and done a final restart...I still need to know what the heck I'm doing technically to get it up and running. First point is asking me what my newly installed Databases admin password is. I have no idea, I've not even opened it, in fact I can't open it as SQL Server Management Studio is not installed by default so I've no way to even look tried leaving it blank but it errored, guess thats Microsofts new security tastic stance. Then there is the permission issues, no feed back at all on what those might be, you simply have to google for them ouch.
If you get through all this (and on my dev machine here I still have yet to) then you can set sites up pretty quickly. That point needs explaining to new users "sorry about the amount we need to install, this is a one time install, once up and running you'll be able to create new sites in a snap". I think it just needs a lot more hand holding with possible solutions to install problems. When I hit a YSOD in the browser I would be nice to have an idea of what the cause is without having to Google around the forums for 10 minutes.
So heres a challenge. Boot up a virtual machine with XP or Win 7 installed and try, just try, to install Umbraco and try to do it with fresh eyes. You're not allowed to click anything up front or second guess, just roll with the punches and see how hard it is. Now make some notes on what the issues are and how we could fix them. I'm no DB guru by a long way so there maybe some legit reasons for needing to know the "sa" password, there is probably a default password I don't know that I could put it (why not suggest that I try that on the install). If the password needs to be some horrid length and mix of characters to get around windows password paranoia tell me up front or show me how to disable it. Could we not try all the folders we need permissions on to ensure we have the right permissions?
All these little baby steps would really help get folk to the good stuff, Umbraco itself. Can we pull together to come up with some suggested solutions/high light problems and possible get involved with coding them up as a community?
Cheers
Pete
Maybe having SQLCe as the default (which doesn't require admin passwords, and requires less setup) would be the way to go? That would simplify the process greatly for beginers who don't know much about setting up SQL server?
I suggest to new readers of this thread that we keep the debate going on in this thread instead: http://our.umbraco.org/forum/getting-started/installing-umbraco/25880-Improving-the-installation-experience?p=0#comment96280 :-)
/Jan
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