Published: January 19, 2018
Out of the Box has just been Committed to Drupal Core 8.6.x
After two years of planning, discussing, and (eventually) coding, the "Out of the Box" initiative has just been committed to Drupal Core.
One of the things most often requested of Drupal has been a better experience "Out of the Box", so that when a new users installs it they see something more positive than a message saying "You have not created any frontpage content yet".
To that end, a strategic initiative called the "Out of the Box Initiative" was set up. I was a member of that team. What we sought to do over the past two years was create a website for a (fictional) publishing company. We decided upon the name "Umami" for a food publishing company, publishing articles and recipes. We went through the full web design process - user stories, validation, requirements gathering, wireframes, design, development ... up to creating what we called the "MEGA Patch". And then submitted about 50 versions of it.
This week we hoped our work would be committed to Drupal 8.5.0-alpha1, but we just missed that deadline. Instead, we had a meeting with the product owners last night to have the final "Needs Product Owners Review" tag removed from the "Create experimental installation profile" issue. Here's the video of that demonstration and meeting:
Following that meeting, the tag was removed and our code was committed to Drupal 8.6.x. This means you'll see it shipping in Drupal in September at the latest, but we hope to get the final beta blockers fixed to have it backported to 8.5.0-beta. If you'd like to help squash some of the bugs, follow these "Out of the Box" issues. Here's the tweet from @webchick (THANKS!) announcing it.
So, what is in this commit?
This commit brings a new installation profile to Drupal. The profile is called "Umami" and has a corresponding "Umami" theme. It creates three content types - basic page, article, and recipe. It has listing pages for articles and recipes, some promotional blocks, a homepage, contact form, and search page. It is a fully-featured (small) website built using only (stable) Drupal core modules.
We are not using experimental modules such as content moderation, layout builder, media, etc. Once they are stable, we hope to bring them into the "Out of the Box" experience as well.
If you'd like to install it, try this link on SimplyTest.me.