[META] Site "Status report" page issues.

[klonos]

I've been testing Backdrop more and more lately and I'm doing so on a local nginx/MySQL/PHP stack on my Windows laptop. I assume that a lot of people that wish to give Backdrop a spin will be doing so locally too before deploying on actual hosting environments.

Now I'm a "all green" maniac when it comes to the site status page. From my experience I know that it's ok for some things to not be ok in this page, but from a newcomer perspective it is scary to see too many errors. Especially when they don't matter, don't make sense, do not apply in certain cases or if no action can be taken on specific scenarios.

So, here's a list of warnings in the "Status report" page that either cannot be resolved on specific cases or don't make sense at all:

• Port or build a shim for update.module to fix "There was a problem checking available updates for Backdrop." #396 and Create a Backdrop Update Server backdrop-ops/backdropcms.org#22 | Backdrop CMS update status: Up to date, "There was a problem checking available updates for Backdrop.": Until we actually have an update server in place this should temporarily be disabled (gray or blue instead of red).
• What are the correct permissions for public_html and settings.php? #395 | Configuration file: Not protected. The settings.php file can be set to read-only on Windows environments, but the backdrop folder cannot be (unless you set every folder and file within it to read-only too - and we don't want that). So, again, on Windows we should "nag" until the setting.php is set to read-only, but once that is done we should make the warning gray/blue.
• Make core aware of Nginx and PHP-FPM to avoid confusing alerts #472 | Upload progress: Not enabled: this one is already blue, but the message says "Your server is not capable of displaying file upload progress. File upload progress requires an Apache server running PHP with mod_php.". Now, in the case of nginx on Windows at least, I do have the php_uploadprogress extension enabled (I verified through php info), so this message doesn't work as it should and doesn't make sense. It does not help the user and causes confusion. As a matter of fact there is this issue in the Drupal queue for D8: Make core aware of Nginx and PHP-FPM to avoid confusing alerts and there's also Add support of PHP 5.4 build-in uploadprogress

Any other OS-specific use cases that are related to the "Status report" page messages, please add them here as tasks and lets discuss what would be the reasonable thing to do. I guess separate issues should be filed for each case.

[jenlampton]

Thanks @klonos, these are great suggestions.

I don't think we should waste time on the available updates message yet - let's wait until we get close to a 1.0.0 release and see if we have an update server up and running. If we aren't close to having the update server and we are close to a release, then yes, we should do something about the nag message.

I like the idea of making our messages better for users on all platforms. That goes for both the settings.php file on windows, and the PHP upload progress message.

Thanks for the d.o issue links, we should peep what's going on over there. Our minimum PHP version is PHP 5.3.6 so we may not be able to use anything that's PHP 5.4 specific, but we can still do a bit better.

[klonos]

I think that the issue about the built-in uploadprogress in PHP 5.4 is to support using it if the php_uploadprogress extension is not available. That doesn't mean that we drop support for the separate php_uploadprogress extension. Besides, from what I see, the 1.0.3.1 version of the extension has versions available for PHP 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6 (at least for windows), so I think that it can still be used with PHP 5.4 and above.

[Bojhan]

Also this page should be redesigned to be muuuch more prettier

[quicksketch]

We're discussing the second bullet point over in #395. I updated the issue summary to reflect the issues in which we're working on each of these.

[xmacinfo]

The status report should be changed to Dashboard (the actual redesigned status report + Dashboard-type status/health information in a pluggable way):

Eg.:
• Number of nodes
• Number of users
• Visitors/page views statistics

My two cents. :-)

[jenlampton]

yes, backdrop should have a useful dashboard (just created #495 as a reminder) but I still think thats distinctly different from the status report.

[quicksketch]

With 1-3 addressed. I feel like we should close this issue. The redesign of the status report page is a pretty big unknown, as we don't have anything to go on other than it should be prettier.

[jenlampton]

I agree. We have another issue for the redesign of the status report so we won't loose track of that. (removing from the meta)