Forum OpenACS Q&A: Community Bid: Support for localized .adp's

• A user shall have the possibility to choose his supported locales in the user profile. If he chooses for the first time, take the values from the browser as already selected defaults. Give them a clear ranking.
• There is a locale table which maps locale code with something nice for the user to choose from {for the list above} (though de_DE is okay, I'd prefer German(Germany)).
• Request processor needs to be amended. Based on the users preferences it serves the localized adp with the highest ranking (e.g. if I say I want German(Germany), French(Swiss), English in that order, the RP should serve me (in that order) index_de_DE.adp, index_de.adp, index_fr_CH.adp, index_fr.adp, index_en.adp, index.adp). Same is true for .tcl files, btw.

how would you support different layouts for different locales. From my understanding, we use the .adp to provide the layout. The easiest example which comes into my mind is the layout of tables for languages that are read right to left. The table needs to have the columns in the opposite order.

Furthermore, I am STRONGLY against storing more stuff than necessary on the database. The database is the bottleneck of all installations, especially as clustering a database is PITA. Whereas having more files on the aolserver filessystem spreaded across multiple servers does not provide that much trouble in comparison. Particularily if we talk enterprise we should think about scalable. And having 40000 students of a university access the system with one database beeing hit for every page a couple of times........

if Don does it anyway, he is happy to grab the money. But maybe other companies are willing to put money into this effort as well so he gets a little bit more for his efforts. And as you might have seen, we need it more urgent than he'd have the time to do it.

The difference between de_DE.adp and de.adp is that the Former is for the Germany German version of the .adp, while the de.adp is just German. Though this might mostly concern content, wording is sometimes different between e.g. Swiss german (de_CH), German german (de_DE) and Bavarian German (de_BEER ?, local dialect spoken in the southern part of Germany). And de.adp would be just German, probably using German german, but who knows. Same is true for French, or British, American and Aussie.

my reasoning for the funding was that I assumed it had already been done at least within Greenpeace therefore we have an already decent design.

Seeing this flaw now I'll rest the bid for now til we found a design the community can agree upon. But I still think this is important work which might not necessarily be done within a clients project, so our intention for sponsoring the implementation is still there.

Sorry for the wrong assumption and the confusion this might have led to.

the idea with the deadline was bad. Agreed. Reasoning was just that universities could adopt dotLRN for their courses and have their students translate some pages, therefore getting localized versions as an immediate benefit. But as I said, bad idea.

A quick note on the company thing you mentioned. The system is in no way intended to get work done we need as a company. It is intended to reflect our willingness to put ressources into something we believe is valueable for the community, but we don't have the time and development power to do it on our own. If it were crucial to our success as a company we'd either be paid for it by a client or try to hire someone full time / full rate to do it.

But maybe we should have started with "I would like to see this in the toolkit, let's discuss how this can be done and once we have a solution, let's bid for it {or wait till someone does it and donate money to him afterwards}". Open for any suggestions, even "forget about it / let it rest / won't work". I've never done this before or seen something like this done, so it is a first time experience.

I appreciate your willingness to put a little cash on the table to move things along, Malte.

I think the Greenpeace implementation can serve as the basis for a design.  I just want to expose it to the normal community participation process and get consensus before anyone asks for the code and takes off running.

So ... it's important for me to get my rough draft document describing our approach out in the open.  Feel free to bug me.  This thread makes it clear that we need to start moving.

Now ... if we get some sort of consensus that the GP work is a reasonable base and I get the relevant pieces of the GP source bundled up (so no one needs to wade through the whole thing looking for them), then I think your offering a small reward for implementation would be a great thing.

And I'd be glad to assist someone in the sense of answering questions etc with them taking home the prize fund.  It would be a help to me to see someone else pick up integrating/rewriting this stuff into the core (again, assuming that we get consensus over the approach).

One issue ... it's not efficient to have a half-dozen folks chasing after a reward (large or small) when only one version of the work's going to be accepted.  Is there some way to put together a fair process so we don't have folks duplicating effort yet give everyone a fair chance to participate in paid work of this sort?  Keeping the amounts modest helps in that not everyone will fall over themselves to do a week or so of work for $400 ...

Sorry for the misinterpretation.  Anyway I still think the idea is ok it may just need to use a different approach.