As it becomes more and more of a project of its own, I expect that the out-of-box experience will become easier and easier. That said, I don’t know if there ever will be a time where it installs the way that WordPress does, as it has a quite different goal and different audience–specifically, an audience that has its own custom django apps to integrate.

However, there is certainly a case to be made that software that allows people to do what they want to do while abstracting away low-level details is valuable to many users. This is especially true if you want wide software/tool adoption. Its one reason why we write in dynamic/scripted languages over Java, and why we often prefer Java to C. It’s one reason why many people prefer hosted blog/social media services to rolling their own. Of course, the risk here is having leaky abstractions, but a tool that you can get up and running in 5 minutes is a huge psychological advantage over something that takes 5 hours (or days, when you’ve got more to learn).

I compared Pinax to WordPress because WordPress another popular social media framework, but it does a really good job of abstracting away implementation details on install (doing plug-ins and some detailed configuration is different). If the Pinax team is looking to make Pinax a ‘killer app’ for python/django, then this out-of-the-box experience may need to be addressed.

More difficult to deal with is the fact that, in order to use pinax, you need to acquire at least a passing knowledge of django convention and configuration, apache convention and configuration, and all the external apps bundled with pinax. This can be a tall order.

Is it too much to ask that you would need to know how to setup the server to serve files and knowledge of the language/framework you’re using to deploy a social network? Seems more than plausible to me. Am I wrong? Some things don’t need to be as easy to set up as wordpress, afiac