[Phpwebsite-developers] phpws Internationalisation

[Ulf H. <U1...@ul...>]

Good morning,

I finally made it on this list. To those of you who might have expecting 
me much earlier: Please excuse - I hope the birth of a daughter is 
reason enough to postpone a couple of hacking activities. ;) To those of 
you who have no idea of what I am talking about, please let me explain.

My basic motivation is that I am running a bunch of web sites based on 
phpws and that I would like to get my custom code supported. Well - you 
might say: That's what we all want. I do think though, that I am talking 
about a feature that is relatively easy to support while being the 
number one reason of large / professional web site not being efficiently 
upgradeable after once being successfully deployed. Guess what I am 
talking about...?

*Multi-Language-Capability.*

Hold on. Doesn't phpws provide that with the language module? Yes, it 
does. But, despite the great documentation of this module, I think it is 
far too complicated for the regular user to integrate some important 
core modules (such as pagemaster). This is because it is not only about 
registering related modules with the lang mod. There are lots of traps 
where the regular user will tap into if he doesn't watch out. If he 
watches out, though, he will end up with a bunch of custom code that 
will be a pain in the neck to re-apply once new phpws versions get released.

*So what can be done?*

First, I think that things like

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=958502&group_id=15539&atid=315539
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=942393&group_id=15539&atid=315539
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=942365&group_id=15539&atid=315539

should make it into the supported code of related core mods. Secondly, I 
think that there should be a recommendation that phpws mods should be 
tested regarding their lang mod integratability, ideally related code 
would be already shipped with the mods and could be activated by a flag. 
I am offering to help coordinating this effort and to provide sort of 
I18N feedback to mod developers. If I knew who they are ....

... - which brings me to the third activity I'd like to initiate: A more 
structured family of web sites where information like this can easily be 
found by the regular user. I think I am an experienced web user, but I 
often found myself lost in the large world of phpws-support-sites.

I have been talking to Kenneth Poulsen about this (so far with no 
success - maybe my baby break is the reason). A key benefit is that this 
effort can leverage the multi-language activities that I described 
above: By providing one multi-lingual core site that uses great phpws 
features like branches etc. (1) to integrate other supported sites and 
(2) to show everybody out there the great things that can be done with a 
system that deserves to be the number one php framework in the world.

I promise that this was my first and last long email ito this list. If 
you think that what I am saying makes sense and if you have an idea 
about how to proceed - please contact me.

Cheers, and greetings from Munich

Ulf


http://www.ulftopia.com/vita_e.html