Future website infrastructure? Internationalization considerations...

[Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>]

Dear gnome-web-list subscribers,

we've had recent discussions on the German GNOME list regarding the
GNOME website. Most people agreed that a centralized GNOME website with
l10n infrastructure and translations of all relevant news items into all
supported languages are very desirable.

This mainly affects user-specific news and events.

Developer documentation translation might not be useful at this point,
especially since we'll have to work on the quality of the current docs
before translating them.


1. Plone

This mailing list's archive seems to suggest that a Plone migration is
planned, and basic code has been in SVN for a while.

On the other hand, according to Murray Cumming (IRC), no proper Plone
l10n seems to be possible as of writing, and I couldn't find any plans
when it would be available.

2. webwmr (debian)

Because of the excellent language selection facilities on debian.org,
today I asked on debian-www, and they offer their webwmr code on debian
CVS: The websites seem to be static [compiled with a template system
from CVS], with internationalized templates. The translator can receive
change notifications through email (including diffs), and update his own
static (translated) page template.


3. MoinMoin

It has also been proposed to migrate to live.gnome.org (i.e. MoinMoin).
Page-specific l10n doesn't seem to be planned at all, and the page
contents' layout doesn't seem to be arbitrarily complex HTML, just some
basic markup.



Conclusion

Instead of migrating back and forth between various systems, maybe we
should look into keeping the current architecture, writing our own
translation system, and stick with static pages. The translation could
be po-based, or custom language-specific static pages [or templates]
could be created and committed (similar to webwmr).


What are your proposals and opinions? 


best regards,
 Christian

-- 
Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>