(Responses to dev@openoffice.apache.org, please) Obviously our website is quite large. Google reports 21207 pages indexed in the www subdomain, and a further 48075 pages in the wiki subdomain. But for purpose of this post, when I talk about the "home page" I'm talking about the contents of our main index.html and the most commonly visited pages directly linked to it, e.g., the why/download/product/get-involved, etc. pages.
This core homepage content amounts to around 25 pages. Today this content is scattered around the content tree. Some of it is in the root. Some of it in /why and /download directories. Some of it is template-related and is in /templates rather than in /content. As a test I tried to create my own NL page, in the fictitious "xx" locale. You can see it here: http://www.openoffice.org/xx/ It is not working correctly, but it already required a lot of non-trivial hacking: 1) I had to hunt around and guess which files to copy. Do I copy scripts, images and CSS, or just content pages? Some of the directories had out-dated content that was not linked to my anyone. It was hard to figure out what the minimum amount of content needed was, and where it was located. 2) The main index.html file had to be edited to refer to CSS in the root, rather than current directory 3) Download page is missed up, missing CSS and/or scripts. Presumably I need to copy something into the xx/download dir, or edit scripts to make them refer /download off the root. 4) The /xx/why pages are not showing the right side navigation now. I must have missed something there as well. Of course, I could figure the above out eventually. It just requires some time and effort and trial and error. But none of this is documented, and even if it were this is a fragile approach and probably beyond th web development skills of a typical translator. But we do know this has been done for some languages. They got it to work. The German page is a good example: http://www.openoffice.org/de/ Now this looks good, but it is still a messy thing from a maintenance perspective. If we make structural changes to the main English page, then those changes need to be manually merged into to every NL page. What can we do to improve this? Here's my idea: 1) What if we refactored the home page so it was all self-contained into these directories: /scripts, /styles, /images and /en/? 2) Make the /en directory be pure content. Only the stuff that needs to be translated. It loads everything else, scripts, images, etc., via URLs relative to the root, e.g.., in /scripts, /styles, etc. 3) Reduce or eliminate any embedded Javascript within pages. For example, refactor the code in download/index.html so it is external and depends on JSON resource files for translated strings. Aim so translators never need to touch script. 4) Ultimate goal is for someone to be able to jump start a new NL home page by simply requesting an svn copy of the /en directory, and then editing the resulting files. No one should ever need to do what I'm doing with the "xx" pages. 5) Maintenance is far easier. Most things like changing the scripts, is done in one place only. But even changes to the HTML are easier. Since we then have a common branch point via the svn copy, when structural changes are added to the main /en HTML, these can be merged in more elegantly to the translated versions, using Subversion. 6) Via Apache redirects we can ensure that the default call to www.openoffice.org/ goes to /en/. Conceivably we could also do locale detection and send requests automatically to the appropriate NL home page. A variation on the above would be to use Pootle, rather than svn copy/merge to maintain the translations. But that would require the same refactoring work to enable it. And it would require further investigation to identify a way of extracting and merging translation strings in MDText files as well as (X)HTML files. This is obviously more than a one-person task. So I'd be interested in hearing what you think in general about this approach, whether there is a simpler alternative I've missed, and whether this is something you'd be interested in helping with. Regards, -Rob --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
