Web page proposal

[Jon Lapham]

I would like to propose a change to the www.gnucash.org web site 
organization concerning the documentation.  If people like this 
proposal, I would be happy to make the changes myself.

Currently there are 9 documentation links.  Of these 9, 6 are some form 
  of internal GnuCash documentation and 3 are external guides.

Below is my *interpretation* of what version of the docs the 6 internal 
GnuCash docs represent:

Tutorial/Concepts (English) - v1.8 user guide
Help Manual (English) - v1.8 help manual
GnuCash Hilfe (Deutsch) - v1.8 help manual in German
Espagnol - v1.6 in Spanish
Francais - v1.6(?) in French
Portugues - v1.6 in Portuguese

The 3 external guides are "GnuCash for Business Users", "Joe Mack's 
Tutorial", and "Dave Gilbert's User Guide".

=====================================

I propose that we clean this up a bit.  What if we had 3 main links, 2 
going to the latest versions of the User's Guide and Help Manual.

Like this (brackets mean a link):

Documentation
[User's Guide]
[Help Manual] [de]
[other]

Notice, there is a [de] link next to help manual, because there is a 
german translation of the help manual.

The [other] link would lead to a new gnucash.org page like this:

=========================================

Contributed Documentation
  [GnuCash for Business Users]
  [Joe Mack's Tutorial]
  [Dave Gilbert's User Guide]

Documentation from v1.6 of GnuCash
  [English] [Espagnol] [Portugues] [Francais]

Documentation from v1.4 of GnuCash
  [English] [Espagnol] [Portugues] [Francais]

Documentation In Development
  [GnuCash v1.10 "in devel" docs]


==========================================

Advantages:

1) we clearly show what we think is the best documentation for people to 
use.  That is, the latest GnuCash documentation.

2) We *still make available* all forms of documentation.  No judgements, 
every possible documentation concerning GnuCash will be available.

3) This approach is much more extensible, when GnuCash v1.10 comes out, 
the documentation for v1.8 simply moves into the [other] link. Hell, if 
we have any "older than 1.6 documentation", let's put that on the 
[other] link too.

4) Left hand column of the web site becomes simpler to navigate, less links.

5) We could put a "in development" link on the [other] page, where 
documentation people could put their in development docs.  Kind of like 
what I am doing now with my own web site.

Disadvantages:

1) Two clicks to get to documentation other than the current User Guide 
and Help Manual.

-- 
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  Jon Lapham  <lapham at extracta.com.br>          Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
  Work: Extracta Moléculas Naturais SA     http://www.extracta.com.br/
  Web: http://www.jandr.org/
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