Improve Download page ideas (Take 2)

[AR795]

@AR795 this is such a good job. Thank you for realizing it!
So we now have a functioning Download page showing the stable version.

Thanks!

Now that I have the proof of concept and semi-implementation of keeping the Appimage page up to date for the FreeCAD development version (it's updated via pywikibot), can we start talking about creating a section for development version?

What I'm thinking is to discuss what it would look like and how would it distinguish itself, presentation-wise, from the stable version. Should it be on the same page (but in a collapsed <div> hiding it from end-users). Should it be in a separate page with a link from the stable version page ?
Etc..etc..

I think having it on the same downloads page would be fine, somewhere below the stable release section there can be a development release section and all those download links can come there. The possibility of having a separate development release page can also be explored, I have seen some projects take this approach.

In the meantime....I'm working on the backend script that will keep the URLs up to date on this theoretical development download page. The github API allows us to grab all sorts of useful info. You can try it via the CLI:

Code: Select all

curl -s 'https://api.github.com/repos/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases/tags/0.18_pre' | jq --raw-output '. | .assets[] | {Build: .name, Size: .size, Downloaded: .download_count, Created: .created_at, Uploader: .uploader.login, Link: .browser_download_url}'

That's a very good solution, it will save time manually updating links.

[Kunda1]

That's a very good solution, it will save time manually updating links.

Yes, I'm working with @kkremitzki to use webhooks so that when a new Release is pushed to the Github release page a script will be triggered to update the said development link. So IMO, I think you could start designing the development download area. On my end I'll work on the backend script and figure out the logic to auto-update the website (I guess using kkremitzki's access to the FreeCAD-Homepage).

Sound good ?

[AR795]

I think you could start designing the development download area.

I will work on it.

[Kunda1]

I will work on it.

Great. Thank you.

[kkremitzki]

having the homepage on shared hosting doesn't give me the ability to mess with that.

I see. I wasn't aware about shared hosting for the homepage.

I've set up a staging environment on a Digital Ocean machine in Frankfurt I'm paying for via my Patreon. It has HTTP/2 enabled, you might be interested to compare the performance of loading the homepage:

https://freecad.io

[Kunda1]

Ran a browser dev tools audit between frankfurt and the current host. Frankfurt is faster. Screenshot shows Frankurt results on the left.

[chrisb]

Similar result here from germany. Though the absolute times displayed seem to be ridiculous. I never had 36 seconds for loading. The image was already shown after a few seconds. Nevertheless both images can be used for comparison.

[AR795]

Yes, indeed the page at freecad.io loads much faster.