Hey everybody,

We've issuing an early preview of all our exciting work with the 8.05 release, Jay Cooke today. You can download the source or read the release notes.

This release is experimental and should not be used in production systems yet. It is only available as a source - VM updates are only for production-ready systems.

Please download it and give it a run - if you're on a non-standard system (like Windows), this is a good chance to get us to fix any compatibility issues before we release the production-ready version on May 1st.

All translators, please also take a change to look at the updated keys and submit new ones - I've attached a diff of the keys added to the default resource file, so that should serve as a good indication. Use this list and compare it to the resources.txt file to get a translation.

Hi Roy,

Impressive - I really like the new file uploads!

My main reason for testing is that the polyglot features would be _incredibly_ useful for us, but I couldn't find any obvious settings or way to enable it after playing for about an hour.

Is there something obvious I missed? When I choose "page settings" I just get a drop-down list with a single item where it says the current language is "invariant".

Cheers,

Erik

To enable the polyglot features, you need to configure your wiki to run multiple languages:

- Open the Control Panel and click on Configuration
- Add a languages config setting whose value is a comma separated list of languages you want to enable on your site. Ex: languages = en, ja, de.
- After that you will see the languages appear in the page properties dialog.

Yeah, sorry about that. The instructions for how to actually set your Deki Wiki into multi-language mode are buried here:
http://wiki.opengarden.org/Deki_Wiki...-language_mode

Bug Advisory: Extensions with async functions are broken in RC1. Affected extensions are the Feed extension (consider using Google.Feed extension instead) and the Dapper extension (consider using web.text/web.html built-in functions instead).

Thanks Brigette/Roy,

Setting the config string enabled it. However, I'm not if I misunderstood it - having a language tag for a page is of course nice, but does it include support for making sites truly multi-lingual, so that each page (think home page) is available in multiple languages that the user can switch between? (but some language versions might of course be empty).

Manually keeping track of two or more entire parallel subtrees of different language pages would rapidly become a nightmare for a large site, and it would only be a matter of days before the two structures had diverged?

Cheers,

Erik

We based our multi-lingual support off of the needs of the MDC site, which supports close to 20 languages. To get a feel for how it's set up on DekiWiki, you can take a peek at our test site here.

The idea is to create a home page for each language off of the root. When you set the page language the entire UI becomes localized to it (ex compare http://mdc.mindtouch.com/De to http://mdc.mindtouch.com/Cn). It's true that each page is not localized in multiple languages, but you can use the wiki.languages extension to mark the related pages in other languages. Templates can be localized in multiple languages (ex. http://mdc.mindtouch.com/Template:Bug).

Hi,

Of course - I realize everything involves compromises ;-)

Two more questions while I have you online:

1. I like the way MDC has it setup so that "all" language homepages appear on a similar level, i.e. the other ones aren't subpages of the en-us version. Is there any easy way to accomplish this in the normal navigation menu, without having an empty "dummy" page as the top page?

If we could just accomplish a really smooth switching between alternate language home pages (below which we could have different menu trees) everything else is a bonus!

2. Have you considered implementing any GUI functionality to set page-language relations? The wiki.languages extension is fine for me and other geeks, but a secretary is probably never going to use it?

Cheers,

Erik

You're going to have to have a root page. This could be a portal to all of your languages. If you really don't want it to show up you could redirect it to one of your main pages (like MDC did). As long as you use wiki.languages on each home page to link to the other language home pages, it should all be connected together. It would be nice if the skin put more emphasis on the "In other languages section" (MDC is going to be customizing it for their needs).

We did consider making the related pages part of the page metadata, so that it could be set through the page properties dialog. I agree that this would be preferable, but was something we weren't able to fit in (it would have involved database schema changes which we wanted to avoid). It's something we might add in the future.

This is definitively not the final step for multi-lingual sites, but it's great step in the right direction. Lots of discussions were done for this implementation and we decided to first meet the needs of the Mozilla community. I'm sure as more deploy Deki Wiki in this capacity there will be great feedback and we'll be right here, ready to listen to it!

Concerning the master homepage. I think doing something like what Wikipedia did is the best way to go (http://wikipedia.org). Show a nice graphic that directs visitors into their respective areas.