I would like to ask permission to work on cleaning up the end-user visible part of the UI of acs-subsite. acs-subsite is part of the core, has no maintainer and needs a caring hand in a few spots. What I have in mind in particular are these points:
*) Review and possibly apply/reject the outstanding patches for acs-subsite, and try to get someone more experienced to review the doubt cases before applying.
*) Completely I18Nize the parts of acs-subsite visible to the casual visitor. Possibly the admin interface as well. There are a lot of pieces and tags missing here. I intend to do this by simply moving the current English text over into new tags in the proper catalog file, and adding translations for Danish. I'm not qualified to do the translation for any other language.
*) Correct, with due apologies to the original translator, some of the Danish translations. Some of them are not proper Danish understandable by the average visitor with no technical background IMHO.
*) Remove any technogarble URL texts visible to the visitor. Please see acs-subsite/www/pvt/home.adp for a nice example of this:
"If you want to check ..., visit garblegarblegarble"
Should probably be something like
"If you want to check ..., visit *this page*"
*) Apply patch #265, which corrects a bug in acs-tcl. All the current cases of passing a simple string with more than one word in it as context currently results in a broken context bar.
*) 'Inline' some of the error messages/pages currently generated through ad_return_error and ad_return_complaint. In some cases the error pages ought to be an ordinary page wrapped in the default template, because the error really isn't one.
An example is the case of visiting the portrait page of an user, who haven't yet uploaded one. This calls ad_return_error even through the scenario is a perfectly valid state for the DB and the web engine as a whole. A HTTP error code 500 ought to only be returned in those cases, where we areally are at a dead end and needs to throw in the towel.
I intend to add a 'return_code' to some of the ADP/Tcl page pairs in order to make the ADP page readable, even though it may get longer.
This also cleans up the code by moving most of the texts visible to the visitors out of the Tcl pages, for centralization of the I18N effort and general ease of maintenance.
*) Adding sensible and possibly empty ALT tags to all images, the portrait in particular, for the benefit of non-graphical browsers (Lynx, screen readers).
*) Piling any thorny issues discovered when doing this work into the bug and/or patch tracker as needed for review before comitting.
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A concept patch demonstrating some of the corrections I have in mind have been uploaded to the patch tracker as patch #266.
I intend to do this work by submitting patches, but the core reason I ask here before starting, is that a reasonable acceptance pace will probably be needed for fast progress, as some of the corrections will to some degree rely on the acceptance of previous ones. At the discretion of the OCT I can also apply the changes directly to CVS HEAD.
