[fpc-devel] Offer to repair and maintain the FPC community website (repeat msg, no HTML)

[Cephas Atheos]

On 27/09/12 12:42 AM, "Vincent Snijders" <vincent.snijders at gmail.com>
wrote:

>2012/9/26 Cephas Atheos <cephasatheos at gmail.com>:
>> What
>> would _you_ want to be able to do in one click (or less)?
>
>Go to http://svn.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/

AAAAhhhh! That scared the HELL out of me! :D

Oh my goodness, that's a huge scary webpage. Nobody who's interested in
just downloading a working IDE and compiler EVER needs to see the server's
underpants like that!

Seriously, that's great for SourceForge geeks (I'm one, I admit it!), but
that page doesn't say "Click here to download Free Pascal 2.6.0", it says
"you obviously know what FTP is, and trunks aren't just for elephants'
holidays". If I'd just got to the site from clicking another link
somewhere that said "Sick of Embarcadero? Click here for a totally FREE,
modern, Pascal compiler and IDE, only better than that!" and I saw that,
I'd click "Back" faster than a cut snake.

That text-only bunch of arcane rows of cells is what we DON'T want new
users to even know exists - until they're ready for it.

What 95% of new users want to do is click "download", click "Install",
then print out a cheat sheet that shows them which menu the examples are
in, then a link to somewhere non-intimidating, requiring no additional
software to build or buy, so they can ask questions like they do in their
other music websites.

But thank you for taking the time to show the url, I had no idea that was
even available. I learn something new every day!

Cheers!