[libreoffice-website] A simpler download page

Hi,

It seems that the download page have been discussed a few times on this 
list (about 6 months and about 12 months ago) and there are also few 
bugs open. The mockups in the wiki all seemed much better than the 
current page.

But being mockups they seemed a bit "stylized" to me. E.g.
- I don't think the drop-downs for navigation works when you have 100+ 
items and the drop-downs are dependent on each other
- The background colors on some mockups seemed a bit much
- The download buttons should signal that all 2-3 packages should be 
downloaded (the gray buttons seem "disabled").
- One mockup had both a version-drop-down and a version-link, which 
seemed redundant.

So to get some data on what files are actually available for download, I 
looked at the database that the website uses for the download page and 
tried to group the files. I wanted to have user be able to see what 
their options are, at a glance. It seemed to me that files can be 
grouped into 7 groups, that can be further grouped in 3 groups:
Platform-downloads: Base-installer, Language-pack and Help-pack.
Packaged-downloads: PortableApp.com-installers and ISO-files.
Developer-downloads: SDK's and source code.

I thought it would be interesting to see what the mockups (I mostly 
looked at Nics and Christophs proposals) would look like with real data. 
Since I am a developer, my mockup tool is code rather than a drawing 
tool :), so I coded it up. This is static versions of what it could 
looks like when a German user arrives on the download page:
http://andershol.github.com/cms-code-demo/download-detected.html
If the user chooses to "Change System or Language", the user is lead 
though these pages. Using separate pages makes it easier to fit 
sufficient descriptions to hopefully make the "Download 
instructions"-page unnecessary:
http://andershol.github.com/cms-code-demo/select-type.html
http://andershol.github.com/cms-code-demo/select-language.html
http://andershol.github.com/cms-code-demo/select-version.html
Note that as a special case for pt-BR, BrOffice-versions are shown as 
separate versions that this seemed the best way of categorizing them. If 
a pre-release is chosen a warning is given:
http://andershol.github.com/cms-code-demo/download-prerelease.html
Note that I will probably remove these static versions in a week or so.

Note that the release notes and feature pages are shown to the right of 
the download buttons (as in Nics proposal) such that sub-menu is not 
needed (pre-releases and portable version are already on page). To make 
it easy for editors, the pages that should be shown can be "tagged" 
using the Meta-Keywords: Putting "download3.4.5" in there for page will 
cause it to show up for the 3.4.5 releases, "download3.4" for all 3.4.x 
downloads and so on.

I believe that the "stable"/"unstable"-language should not be used, but 
instead be called "recommended" and "previous release".

This implementation can be found as patches to the CMS on Github:
https://github.com/andershol/cms-code/
I tried to keep it very self-contained to make it easy to try out. This 
mean that the code implementes a new page type (DownloadSimplePage) 
instead of modifying the old such that the new can be tested 
concurrently with the old and it would be easy to revert (just create a 
new page with the new type, and hide the old).

I have not load-tested the page, since I don't know that kind of load 
the download page normally receives. But since the current page is also 
a dynamic page (that have cached elements), this shouldn't be that 
different. The current page is about a 500kb (excluding jquery) while 
this simpler page is about 8kb and far fewer rows a fetched form the 
database and turned into objects on a cache miss, so that might make it 
a bit easier on the server. But on the other hand in the new version 
data is cached in a bit rawer format.

--
Anders

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