I've seen #11143 , this issue talks about another part of the installation process.

As far as I can imagine, the Symfony installation process is done by 2 big target groups: Symfony Beginners and Regular Symfony Users.

It doesn't fit Beginners

Let's assume we don't know anything about Composer and Symfony. The docs tell me to download composer and run composer create-project. All fine, but then I get a lot of questions. I don't even know where those questions are talking about:

1. "Would you like to use Symfony 3 directory structure?" What is the Symfony 3 directory structure? I can't find anything about it in the docs. The only thing I can find is a github discussion with 1k comments.
2. "Would you like to install Acme demo bundle?" I myself always want to download as less as possible due to slow internet, so I would go for "No". That means I'm no longer able to follow the Quick Tour guide (and docs in general). People don't know that when downloading Symfony on the first try...
3. After this it starts to ask me questions about the database, etc. Most of these are not very clear for beginners.

(some of these are stolen from @weaverryan's comments in symfony/symfony-docs#3874 , I've put them here to centralize all issues with the questions).

It doesn't fit Regular Users

Now assume you are a regular Symfony user (wouldn't be that hard for most of us :P). You always get 2 questions you just need to skip: Of course you do not want to install the AcmeDemoBundle and of course you do want to use the familiar structure (or you don't want to, but in any case your answer will always be the same).

Then there are a dozen of questions asks by the ParameterHandler. While they can be usefull for some developers, I think they aren't usefull for enough developers to say that the feature isn't usefull. To name a couple:

• Developers using the Code First Approach, they don't want to worry about the database yet
• Developers using Propel ORM
• Developers using an SQLite database (only one parameter does apply to them and one they need is missing)
• Developers using another Doctrine implementation (e.g. PHPCR ODM)

As you can see, there is too much noise which confuses beginners and annoys regular users. I think it's time to change that!

How?

I'm open for a lot of other suggestions, but I think we've reached a point where we've seen that maintaining one edition to fit all isn't the way to go. I think we need to do 4 things:

• Completely remove the beginners stuff from the SE
• Maintaining a seperate starters-edition or sandbox for beginners and usage in the docs
• Support and stimulate open source projects in maintaining their own Symfony editions (like the Symfony CMF Standard Edition and Sonata Standard Edition).
• Support the community to come up with their own editions (like the Rest Edition)