Seven months ago, Matthew Grasmick published an article describing how hard it is to install Drupal. His article included the following measurements for creating a new application on his local machine, across four different PHP frameworks:

Platform
Clicks
Time
Drupal
20+
15:00+
Symfony
3
1:55
WordPress
7
7:51
Laravel
3
17:28

The results from Matthew's blog were clear: Drupal is too hard to install. It required more than 15 minutes and 20 clicks to create a simple site.

Seeing these results prompted me to launch a number of initiatives to improve the evaluator experience at DrupalCon Nashville. Here is the slide from my DrupalCon Nashville presentation:

A lot has happened between then and now:

• We improved the download page to improve the discovery experience on drupal.org
• We added an Evaluator Guide to Drupal.org
• We added a quick-start command to Drupal 8.6
• We added the Umami demo profile to Drupal 8.6
• We started working on a more modern administration experience (in progress)

You can see the result of that work in this video:

Thanks to this progress, here is the updated table:

Platform
Clicks
Time
Drupal
3
1:27
Symfony
3
1:55
WordPress
7
7:51
Laravel
3
17:28

Drupal now requires the least time and is tied for least clicks! You can now install Drupal in less than two minutes. Moreover, the Drupal site that gets created isn't an "empty canvas" anymore; it's a beautifully designed and fully functional application with demo content.

Copy-paste the following commands in a terminal window if you want to try it yourself:

mkdir drupal && cd drupal && curl -sSL https://www.drupal.org/download-latest/tar.gz | tar -xz --strip-components=1php core/scripts/drupal quick-start demo_umami

For more detailed information on how we achieved these improvements, read Matthew's latest blog post: The New Drupal Evaluator Experience, by the numbers.

A big thank you to Matthew Grasmick (Acquia) for spearheading this initiative!