The download of ClassicPress files could be simplified by two steps:
To many clicks to find the zip or tar.gz files. Once the user click on the download link, he is taken to another download page. One more click takes him to Github. One more click on assets finally shows the two files. Why so many clicks needed?
The download files should be hosted on ClassicPress server instead of Github. Many users are hesitant downloading files from another server and specifically if they never have heard of Github.com
These are some good points. I think this might be worth some attention. I don’t think it’s really a petition thing. Maybe the community lead @wadestriebel or development lead @james can answer this? I dont know whose domain this falls under.
I completely agree, there was an article released a couple of months ago (in French) that mentioned the same thing. That being said, I think this is a question for @james and @invisnet.
Yes, that’s definitely something we should improve.
GitHub provides a secure and reliable service - why reinvent the wheel? The release can be signed (which it is) to prove it’s an official release and to ensure it can’t be hijacked. The one thing we do need to do is to publish the public key somewhere on the CP site - @james and @wadestriebel I think that’s one for you.
We’d need to do a lot of infrastructure work before we could consider hosting the download, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s worth it.
From my own usage of GitHub…it ain’t simple.
I am never sure what and where I am to download something.
I kept clicking on the ClassicPress 1.0.1 link at the top of the page and got nothing.
It took me 3 minutes to find the zip at the bottom.
Just my take on GitHub. I don’t care for it.
Give me 1 link to start the DL.
I think this is a valid question and I wonder if the current process may be keeping people from trying ClassicPress – either because there’s too many clicks, or because they don’t use GitHub or are frustrated by it. (and to @thewolf’s point, I just went over to the link he referenced and I can totally see how the download page can be confusing.)
How can we make this process easier for our potential users – including our less-technically-minded users?
Make the download button a proper CTA everywhere it appears, instead of a link…and have it linked directly to the download – there’s no need for anyone to be redirected to GitHub. Those who are technical in nature will be savvy enough to look at the target URL and find the repo if they need it. I also think the download button should come before the migrate button on the homepage.
When you click migrate, you go to a page all about the migration plugin. But when you click download on the homepage, you first get taken to this page that asks you if you want to really download or rather have the migration plugin. I think that’s a bit double? Youre asking them to choose twice between a clean download and the migration plugin.
That is what I thought also. Forgot to mention one thing - The “Assets” link at GitHub is smalI - in fact it is the smallest font size on the bottom of the page. Must be very hard for regular Joe or Jane to find the download files indeed.
GitHub is the best choice for us to host our downloads for the foreseeable future. There is another big reason for this which we haven’t covered yet in this thread: it helps us keep bandwidth costs down.
I also agree that GitHub is not intuitive to people who haven’t seen it before. I sometimes forget this, I’ve been using it for a long time and it’s a great solution for managing and developing code. This is why ClassicPress uses it for development.
This wouldn’t help us in this particular case, because we need a download backed by a chain of trust and a cryptographically verifiable process. git + GitHub gives us this, and GitHub custom domains are mostly for hosting static websites rather than full git repositories.
There are a few things we can do to improve the situation though:
Link directly to the zip file on GitHub, instead of requiring multiple clicks. We need a way to do this without requiring an update each time we release a new ClassicPress version, and as @omukiguy says above he has written code for this, we just haven’t integrated it into the site yet.