Re: [libreoffice-website] A simpler download page

Hi Anders, *,

sorry for jumping in late to the discussion...

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 9:01 PM, Anders Holbøll <andershol@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Indeed - but so far nobody come up with the corresponding html to the mockups..

The most important part first: Note that the site is not limited to
stuffing all the downloads into the page like it is done currently,
i.e. one could use ajax instead to only load the selected files to
make the downloadpage lighter.

> [grouping the available downloads]
> Platform-downloads: Base-installer, Language-pack and Help-pack.
> Packaged-downloads: PortableApp.com-installers and ISO-files.
> Developer-downloads: SDK's and source code.

Yes, that fits. But note that The Packaged-downloads have a different
release schedule. (or: They are released some time after the platform
and developer downloads as they are named above). This & the point
that they are not available for all languages is what made me not
include them in the autmatically generated list of downloads, but
rather have projects manually list them.

> 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 :),

Thank you very, very much for starting with this!

> 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

Very nice already, I'd only make the emphasis for linux on x86 vs
64bit, and not deb vs rpm. And the "separate pages" can nicely be
ajaxified

> http://andershol.github.com/cms-code-demo/select-language.html

This is the only one that seems a little problematic to me - more
precise: how to localize this. The list is ordered by the english
labels, and the system only knows the english & the native name.
(that's why the current dropdown is sorted by iso-code rather than
languagename)

> 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.

BrOffice was only available with 3.3. With 3.4 and 3.5 the BrOffice
branding was removed, pt-BR also is branded as LibreOffice, so no need
to special-case it anymore.

> This implementation can be found as patches to the CMS on Github:
> https://github.com/andershol/cms-code/

Thanks a lot for this as well!

> 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),

Indeed - it is "half-cached" - i.e. it uses silverstripe's <% cached
%>...<% end_cached %> construct in the page-templates, so that the
long list of downloads doesn't need to be refetched from the database
all the time.
But with the simple download page & ajax to receive the selected
download and not include all available downloads into the page source.
No idea how it will perform with that then, but I don't see a real
problem. Currently the server is not challenged at all :-)

> 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.

I didn't look at your patches yet, but it seemed you already did dig
into it. Once again thank you very much :-)

I'll bring the github version up-to-date with local changes later
today, and then will look into your patches.

ciao
Christian

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