So I can get (horribly long and user-unfriendly) download links to
different versions of a document and post those links on wiki or
website or wherever. That still doesn't solve the problem of how
people know, ONCE THE FILE IS DOWNLOADED TO THEIR COMPUTER, what
version of LO it's for. I'm sure I'm not the only person who downloads
user guides and then (an hour or a day or a month later) can't easily
tell what software version they were were for.
Yes, the download links are hardly human-readable. This is certainly
something that advanced configuration of the Alfresco platform could
resolve, but - at present - one would have to live with this
limitation.
As regards user guide versions and software versions, I'm not sure
whether the average end user faces the issue of having multple
versions on the same machine. Don't *most people* just stay up to date
with the latest version? As long as they have quick access to that
latest version, and an easy means of getting access to an index of
past versions, isn't that perhaps enough?
What about people who want to go to, say, media.lo.org, browse around,
and find individual chapters or books for a specific version of LO?
(In other words, not following specific download links.) At the moment
it's clear (by the directory structure: different folders for
different LO versions) and the filenames. I don't understand how they
will be able to tell this information if there is only one "Published"
folder for each book, and one filename for each chapter.
If the guest is browsing directly on the Alfresco platform via
http://media.libreoffice.org, this problem could be solved fairly
easily through appropriate permissions configuration, so that the
anonymous guest gets only to see the Published folder, with whatever
content you want to be visible to them (you can achieve that
fine-grained control through document-specific permissions).
But, here again, proper information in documents' meta tags would let
people make an advised choice of what do download, and so maybe one
wouldn't need to constrain what content they see.
But there's nothing stopping us using the current folder structure,
and perhaps it's a good idea to stay with it since it's easier for
non-experts to comprehend.
My questions are not just about how we, the Docs team, can work
efficiently. Equally, or even more importantly, we need to consider
how our consumers, the users, can easily find, identify, download,
store and retrieve the docs they need.
I guess one has to decide whether you want to use
http://media.libreoffice.org as a browsing facility for guests, or
whether you want to use it as a source of publicly-accessible links to
be posted on http://libreoffice.org and/or the wiki.
In the former case, the advantage would be that you could avoid having
to do updating work on 3 sites when publishing a guide. You'd only
have to work directly on the Alfresco platform, and possibly set
visibility permissions on a per-folder or per-document basis.
Another reason why different filenames for different LO versions are
useful: when a user reports an error, they need to tell us which file
it's in (or, in your system, which version of that file), because we
need to know if it's an obsolete version or only applies to a specific
version, etc.
Displaying version info stored in a document's meta tags would enable
users to be able to refer to a particular version of a document.
Also, I don't understand how, if all the versions of a file (both
drafts and published) are stored under one filename, we can tell which
are the published versions vs the drafts.
Again, entering information in a document's meta tags would be the
solution. One just has to devise an appropriate set of meta tags.