Website and download confusion
Phil Longstaff
plongstaff at rogers.com
Wed Nov 11 09:03:06 EST 2009
I generate the release note and news by hand. For the news item, I create a new file in htdocs/trunk/news, and automated scripts (php?) create the gnucash page. I then trim out the HTML stuff and post it to the mailing lists.
Phil
________________________________
From: Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be>
To: gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
Sent: Wed, November 11, 2009 8:22:58 AM
Subject: Website and download confusion
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
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