[Mageia-i18n] I need someone to fix this …

[Wolfgang Bornath]

2011/6/15 Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org>:
> Le mercredi 08 juin 2011 à 22:17 +0200, Olav Dahlum a écrit :
>> On 08/06/11 21:55, Oliver Burger wrote:
>> > Olav Dahlum <odahlum at broadpark.no> schrieb am 08.06.2011
>> >> Yes, I noticed the discussion about whether we should just use a
>> >> stock solution like Joomla, Drupal (7?), etc, to avoid spending
>> >> too much time on this.
>> > But this is not really a topic for i18n to decide...
>> >
>> > Oliver
>> >
>>
>> Of course, but you are involved in both, and did say it was important
>> to select one with proper i18n support. So I guess this should be
>> decided in union by both the web team and i18n, to maintain everyone's
>> needs. Just my opinion on this matter...
>
> Proper i18n support should then be explained. Django, Catalyst, likely
> rails have support for .po and internationalisation, but maybe there is
> a better system somewhere ?
>
> Does any people here have experience with various websites translations
> system and some ideas to give ?

Well, I have done that for years for Mandrake/Mandriva, even into the
era when the testing of various systems started.

The solution which worked during my years at Mandrake/Mandriva:

 - we had an organisation of web-translators (12-15 languages) with
our own mailing list.
 - each translator had svn access to the website tree in his language
 - whenever a change in one of the pages occurred the coordinator
(Gaël Duval) sent a mail with a diff of the change to the list
 - the translator then either scp'd the page and made the changes
local, uploaded again with scp, or used a tool like emacs-tramp to
edit online
 - uploading / editing was done on an intermediate server which did a
nightly push to the real webserver.

We also cared for announcements and press releases in all our
countries. This worked very well for a couple of years. The
translators were a friendly team who also communicated a lot about
other things than work and tasks. It all fell apart when Gaël Duval
left and nobody took over.

Seeing that this involves "raw" html editing and access to the website
tells me that this is possibly not what you want. But I never ever
experienced such an easy and quick workflow again. Nobody had to wait
for anybody else doing something for him, each of us could see the
result directly on the "intermediate" server and make fast corrections
in the middle of the night without bothering anybody else.

Later Mandriva tried a CMS. It took a steep learning curve at the
beginning but it was ok and could have been a success, were it not for
the many bugs and crashes of the system (there were 2 people working
on it IIRC, one of them an intern who left in the middle of the
starting stage).

Later there was no real translation organisation for the Mandriva
website any more because the website was in constant change.

So, yes, maybe a CMS could be a solution but this also means
 - a mountain of work in customizing the templates
 - a good organisation of the various permission levels (must be
secure but not show-stopping, to many restrictions drive volunteers
away)
 - a learning experience for most people involved

I have some experience setting up and administrating Joomla! (I used
it for the mandrivauser.de website for a while) but in the end I found
it not flexible enough concerning permissions.

-- 
wobo