Website and download confusion

[Colin Law]

2009/11/11 Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be>:
> 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.

In addition could I suggest a prominent button at the top of the home
page labeled Download Stable Version or something similar, that takes
one to the appropriate download location.

Colin

>
> 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
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