March 20, 2008
Deki Wiki Goes Polyglot
BrigetteK @ 2:59 pm
While working on our MediaWiki to Deki Wiki converter, I needed to convert a MediaWiki site running in multiple languages. This functionality was implemented using a MediaWiki instance for each language. The approach is problematic since wiki management needs to be handled separately for each language; users had to maintain a user page per language, the same extensions were registered for each instance, common templates could not be leveraged, and there was no easy mechanism for performing cross-language searches. Thus, we were inspired to support multiple languages within a single Deki Wiki instance.
Multi-language support required several new features including a UI that updates automatically based on page language, localized templates, and language-aware search. For more information, refer here. If these features interest you, stay tuned - they will be available in our next major release (1.10).
categories: MindTouch
This looks very cool. To complement the new multi-language support, someone should write a translation extension based on Google’s new translation tool api: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/
I am not sure I am up to the task, but it is something that Steve could probably whip up in no time, especially with his open source superhero powers.
What should it do? Translate a page or a section of a page in any of the supported languages of the api. There shoudl be a drop down so that the end-user could select his or her desired language. For example, what if I come across a page written in a language I was unfamiliar with, but I wanted to know what it said I could translate it or at least attempt to. There is also a language detection feature of the api that could tell me at least what the language is.
Comment by Ed — March 21, 2008 @ 11:12 am
That is a great idea and should be easy to write! I’ve filed a feature suggestion on it (http://bugs.opengarden.org/view.php?id=3648) and have assigned it to the open source superhero himself.
Comment by BrigetteK — March 21, 2008 @ 11:25 am
Sounds great. Do you have any plans for bidirectional text support at this point? Specifically, I’d love to see hebrew working in Deki.
Comment by Ilan — March 24, 2008 @ 10:40 pm
Ilan: If you can help us with bidirectional support, that’d be great
We’ve been wanting to get it into our application for a while now, but nobody in-office has experience for what this would entail.
Comment by Roy — March 26, 2008 @ 9:46 am