Website and download confusion

[Geert Janssens]

Hi,

There have been a couple of messages on the user list lately about people 
mistakenly downloading the development version instead of the stable version.

Cause of this appears to be the news page that prominently shows the new 
(unstable) releases, while the latest stable release is more down on the same 
news list.

I am currently looking at the website's sources to see if I can improve on 
this. I think I can.

I propose to make the following changes:

1. The "Download" section in the menu:
I propose to split this menu in two subsections: "Stable (2.2.x)" and 
"Unstable (2.3.x)" and have download links below both of these two pointing to 
the relevant download locations.

2. News topics
I propose to add some additional style to the unstable release news topics to 
make it more visible that these releases are in fact development releases. The 
text explains this nicely, but it doesn't jump out. I intend to include the 
complete "WARNING - WARNING - ... " block in a more visual alert box preceded 
by an exclamation mark, or stop sign or...

I have some questions before I start though:

* Browsing through the page, I notice there are several download locations for 
GnuCash. There is
a. sourceforge.net
b. www.gnucash.org
c. ftp.at.gnucash.org

These three are all used in the Download menu section. The news sections 
mostly contain a link to gnucash.org, or sometimes even an additional link to 
an external site.

Personally, I think this is confusing. Secondly, I'd like to know which link 
is preferred. I would think Sourceforge.net, as that would limit the bandwidth 
on www.gnucash.org. SF is also the first link under Downloads, which makes me 
believe it is indeed preferred.

But if so, wouldn't it be better to provide the SF link in the release news 
items as well ?

* I wonder about the release news items. How are they generated ? I know that 
with each release, the release message is posted on the ml as well, but that 
edition is text-only. So I'm wondering if the news pages can be manually 
edited or are they generated by some script that parses the text-only release 
message from somewhere ?

Regards,

Geert