simlify auto-install instructions

[FredKSchott]

What kind of changes does this PR include?

• Minor content fixes (broken links, typos, etc.)
• New or updated content
• Translated content
• Changes to the docs site code
• Something else!

Description

• Needed for SImplify "astro add" by removing confusing multi-select astro#3715
• Separate from that PR, I find this new copy much more focused and therefore easier to read. I tried to keep every piece of useful or relevant info, but was able to remove quite a bit thanks to the simplified flow of SImplify "astro add" by removing confusing multi-select astro#3715 and some clever restructuring of the page sections.

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[delucis]

Thanks for putting this together to accompany the CLI PR @FredKSchott!

I’ve given this a fairly hefty review — hope you don’t mind. I think this basically comes down to who we’re writing for. I personally would be happy following the new version of this guide but the current version of the page was carefully written with a beginner in mind and I’d love to see some of the hand holding that that entails preserved.

Maybe once we have Sarah’s tutorial up we could revisit that — have a detailed, beginner-focused tutorial and slim down this install guide? But until then this page is our opportunity to snag new users and call out helpful features.

Curious to hear what you think!

[FredKSchott]

Thanks for the review @delucis! I totally agree with your comment on our goal to write with the beginner in mind, and I think a lot of the removed copy here is because the create-astro tool itself is now more beginner friendly (see the linked PR above for a video explaining how).

[delucis]

Thanks for taking my comments on board Fred! 💜

I do still worry slightly about framework support being buried — some of Astro’s hype is around its framework support and then it ends up at the bottom of this page and at the bottom of our sidebar, but maybe that’s good: hype to draw folks in, then get them comfortable with .astro components and they may never need React 🤞

I think I’ll hand over to @sarah11918 at this point to get some expert fresh eyes to do a read through and see how it feels with your revisions.

[delucis]

LGTM! Thanks for the great team work on this one folks.

At some point, I wonder if we will want to revisit having “Install NPM Dependencies” as such a prominent second step given it’s effectively optional if you follow the wizard, but for now I’d say this is looking pretty good!

[sarah11918]

Fair enough, @delucis ! Good thing docs are never done. ;)

@FredKSchott , Chris and I just fine-tuned some of the recent changes via executive decision on this branch. So, I'm sure you'll want to now look at it with fresh eyes. But we are now LGTM as soon as you're happy with it!

[sarah11918]

Just a freshness ping @FredKSchott that Chris and I made a few changes you should check on! We are otherwise happy, though. So when you're happy, it's LGTM from us!

[FredKSchott]

Took another pass! Again, my goal here is to avoid repeating things that the wizard already tells you. Because the wizard itself is targeting a beginner audience, then it should be beginner friendly on its own! Said another way: If you need to refer to docs on how to run our beginner friendly wizard, then that problem can't be solved with docs, and needs to be solved by improving the wizard.

@sarah11918 one thing that you've called out here that I really agree with is that the template selector doesn't give much guidance as to which template you should pick. I think that should absolutely be added to create-astro!

[FredKSchott]

Follow up here: withastro/astro#3831

I don't want us to spend too much time going back and forth on this too much more. I'm going to merge as-is, then lets give this some time to collect user feedback and we can revisit if we're still not happy.

In the meantime, if anything still feels difficult or tricky for the user, lets improve create-astro itself! For example, I just fired off withastro/astro#3831 to improve some wording to give better guidance for new users.