Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Multi lingual support

When you support languages like OmegaWiki does, then there are two levels where this support is provided.
  • Localisation of the user interface
  • Localisation of the data
With the recent major upgrade of OmegaWiki we moved up from release 1.10a to 1.16a. As a consequence we gained the massive amount of localisations that had been provided to MediaWiki by the fine people at translatewiki.net. This is shown really well in for instance the Russian language..

The complete user interface is now in Russian. We will be able to do even better in the future. We will implement the "LocalisationUpdate" extension; this allow us to continuously adopt all relevant new localisations as committed to the code repository from translatewiki.net.

Making OmegaWiki a resource that is continuously updated for its multi language support is a dream come true. Really important in this has been the perseverence of RobertL. He got to grips with the complicated even convoluted code that makes OmegaWiki. His work included a lot of sanitising of the code base, this will make it not that hard for us to upgrade in the future.

One other upgrade is planned; this is the implementation of the Babel extension. We will be saying goodbye to all the current templates. They have served us well but they have been an absolute pain to maintain. Smaller project like OmegaWiki are best served by getting the localisations for this functionality from one central place. It makes thousands of templates redundant and, new localisations will now be provided on a daily basis through the LocalisationUpdate.

All in all, the latest major upgrade to OmegaWiki has been an important and most necessary boost to our code base. It adds a new sparkle to our project.
Thanks,
GerardM

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, congratulations!
I was not aware of this major upgrade.
This is definitely a new spark for the project and it allows OmegaWiki to evolve side by side with MediaWiki.

André Malafaya

Christen said...

what is omegawiki