Hi *,
thanks to Anders' work, the simplified/buttonized download page is
available online for testing at https://www.libreoffice.org/download35
Plese give it a shot with various browsers.
It is not shown in menus, and not in google sitemap, but it is public
for testing. Please use accordingly.
There are a few quirks and usability issues after having a look at the
site live (at least in my opinion - selection of language doesn't work
well, and when manually choosing it isn't obvious that it is a
multi-step process and things like that)
And a few theming issues (when there are no "related pages", the void
space should be filled with something else, now the english page looks
like something is missing (as the related pages haven't been tagged
like described below)
So while not perfect, it is a big step towards a revised download page.
I think at first we should make it en-US only and only use it at the
frontpage, as translations are missing anyway. (i.e. always start of
with presenting the download buttons, and if in doubt the windows
download if OS or language cannot be guessed)
His introduction below for reference.
ciao
Christian
On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 9:01 PM, Anders Holbøll <andershol@gmail.com>
wrote:
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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