The best method to build a multi-language Drupal 6 site? - drupal

I found many articles on the web but most of them are so old and written for drupal 5 or even 4. I'm looking for recent modules or recent updated modules for drupal 6. And a manual on how to use them.
I already found this article http://drupal.org/node/275705 which is pretty good but also more then 2 years old so probably not up to date.
Thanks

I use:
i18n-6.x-1.5.tar.gz
l10n_client-6.x-1.8.tar.gz
lang_dropdown-6.x-1.2.tar.gz
languageinterface-6.x-2.5.tar.gz
multicurrency-6.x-1.x-dev.tar.gz
Note that you best try all these modules first, and when you start building your site, start from scratch and do some planning. There may be issues otherwise with pages that cannot be found / accessed and so on.
Especially with the following modules I had some issues:
front-6.x-1.2.tar.gz
tcontact-6.x-1.1.tar.gz
The language interface comes in very handy and allows you to look for strings on a page and immediately translate them. If you are really going multilingual, you may consider using the transliteration module as well when you are storing files etc.
Greetz,
Joachim

Related

Possible to search through all JSPs in Adobe CQ5 repository with CRXDE?

We have a couple of relatively simple websites running on Adobe CQ 5.5 that were developed by a third party. I'm pretty familiar with how CQ works, but I'm working with somebody else's code here and I need to be able to search through all components in the system for a particular string.
The issue is that I can't seem to find a way to search across all of the various .jsp files stored with the various system components. I would have figured that the query tool in CRXDE Lite would have done the trick with something like this:
/jcr:root//*[jcr:contains(., 'Find this exact string in a JSP')] order by #jcr:score
But I've had no luck.
What I am looking for is some sort of global search that includes JSP files. Is that possible? Were I using a regular Java system, any IDE worth the download would be able to do this.
Thanks.
Might not be easiest way, but you can use the VLT tool to checkout the repository into your filesystem. Then you can lookup using whatever tool you prefer. It might even be faster in the long run
I don't have the actual answer but I suppose the JSPs are indexed via a filter that strips out some of their content.
It should be possible to configure the repository to index them as is instead, based on the info at http://wiki.apache.org/jackrabbit/IndexingConfiguration and http://jackrabbit.apache.org/jackrabbit-text-extractors.html
Sorry about the vagueness of this answer - I know the basic principles but to provide the details I would need more time than I can afford now ;-)

Using Drupal for an accounting system?

I'm working for non-profit whose has a very outdated system for tracking donations from its benefactors based on Microsoft Access 2003. They want to move to a web product (it's only used in-house), but I am very hesitant to build a lot from scratch. A technical consultant suggested using Drupal to replace the system, by building around it. I am unsure of this however, as Drupal seems mostly to be for content display only and not ideal for any sort of mathematical operation (such as summing the donations received in a year), reports, etc.
Does anyone have any experience using Drupal in this or a similar maner?
Drupal is very flexible and there are a lot of powerful modules for (almost) anything.
I don't know your requirements, but I will recommend you give a try to this CMS. If your question is about how manipulate maths operation, look https://drupal.org/project/computed_field
But I think your solution can be near to CRM Core module: https://drupal.org/project/crm_core with https://drupal.org/project/crm_core_donation

Opensource v/s custom-developed e-store

I need to develop an e-store application in C#.NET. There are number of open-source packages already available, like nopcommerce, dotnetcart and so on. I went through the source code of some and found them very tedious or to say very deep functional. My requirement is pretty straightforward. Need to have just one level of categorization and a simple and clean front-end. Therefore, i am bit sceptical about using such big solution for a simple e-store.
What do you think ?, should i use the already existing solutions or develop the one accustomed to my requirements.
Use Ecwid. It very simple, free and easy built shopping cart for any site: http://www.ecwid.com
Try to consider Orchard CMS + e-commerce-module.

Is Plone doing enough to keep up with other CMSes?

I do Drupal for a living and I like the system. However I've always been intrigued by Plone and wanted to learn it well to broad base my knowledge of CMSes in general. I've played around with Plone in the past and was both mesmerized and repulsed by it -- depending on the day.
But then again here is what I saw as the advantages of Plone
Python sweet Python
Built on battle hardened and uber mature Zope 2
Zope 3 style which is now available in Zope 2 also and therefore in Plone
Objects and not SQL
True separation of configuration and content (unlike Drupal where configuration and content is totally mixed up in the database)
Very powerful system to make custom content types (unfortunately not via a UI)
However it surprised me that there was nothing that I could find equivalent to views ( http://drupal.org/project/views ) and that taxonomy (i.e. classification) was not a first class citizen. Every Plone product seemed to take its own approach to taxonomy. All in all, though I loved its extreme and idealistic approach, it always struck me that everything was so darn difficult to accomplish in it.
I've really been hoping for Plone to succeed and every few months will explore its RSS feeds only to go back dejected.
I thought I'd test out Plone 4. The new feature list in Plone 4 was totally underwhelming to me ( http://plone.org/products/plone/features ).
Drupal 7 new features ( http://drupalcode.org/viewvc/drupal/drupal/CHANGELOG.txt?revision=1.373&view=markup) and Wordpress 3 ( http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0 ) seem to have done tons more in their new major releases.
Moreover replacement to Archetypes through Dexterity ( http://plone.org/products/dexterity/documentation/faq/how-is-dexterity-related-to-archetypes/view ) is also a great step forward. So while Plone 4 itself may be an improvement over 3.x is it enough to keep Plone in the reckoning amongst other CMSes?
Which brings me to my question:
Is Plone on a steady decline? Whats the future of Plone? Am I wrong in my assessment that Plone is not adding functionality and features at the rate other top tier CMSes are?
This http://www.google.com/trends?q=plone seems to confirm my fears.
Should I give Plone 4 a try and make it my "second" CMS?
Let me get the bias out of the way first: I'm one of the co-founders of Plone, so make of that what you will. ;)
Plone 4 is in many ways an "intermediary" release — the original plan was to make it into a large release with new UI approach (new layout system Deco), improved type definition system (Dexterity) and improved theming story (currently referred to as XDV, name will probably change).
Along the way, we realized that we needed a smaller release before we did that, so the major improvements got pushed to a new Plone 5 milestone, and Plone 4 was turned into a infrastructure / cleanup type release.
With that goal in mind, the team delivered the fastest Plone yet (it trounces Drupal, Joomla and WordPress for speed), improved a lot of very important infrastructure (files are now stored outside of the database, it uses much less memory than it used to, and scales a lot better to large number of parallel requests).
The innovation is still ongoing, and now that Plone 4 is out, we're fully focused on delivering Plone 5, which should have a lot of the new features and improvements that were originally planned as Plone 4. In the meantime, we have an extremely solid and fast base to work from, and deploy customers on.
You can also make make use of a lot of the Plone 5 tech in Plone 4 already — examples include the aforementioned Dexterity type definition system, the XDV theming system, and several other infrastructure improvements like the Chameleon template language (adds ~50% speedup for most pages).
So, no — we're not adding features at any slower pace — if you look at the source code history and activity instead of Google Trends (which isn't a very useful metric for something as niche as a CMS system), you'll see that there are more active developers and more code improvements than ever before.
Yep Collections do most of what is described by that description of Drupals Views. One thing that collections don't do out of the box is the grouping/taxonomy. There are additional plugins that can help do that such as collective.collection.yearview. Taxonomy options could be stronger but in reality nested collections work for most use cases.
As for the future of plone? Plone's popularity has remained static for the last couple of years as it has gone through it's massive internal restructuring. It's lost developers and gained developers. Compared to the rise Drupal and CMS's in general that may look like decline. The important thing now is that, due to that restructuring, Plone is now very developer friendly. Due to Diazo/XDV which most Plone integrators are switching to, Plone is now very designer friendly. It's also now fast and just as secure and flexible as it always has been. Expect Plone to start getting a lot more outside attention and growth from now on.
As Limi mentioned the mantra has been 'Plone 4 is the evolutionary release, Plone 5 is the revolutionary release'. As DisplacedAussie said, look at 'Collections' in Plone, they are like saved searches and combined with the Collections Portlet are pretty powerful.
Coming up in Plone 5 is the Deco/Tiles system for content editing, this is going to be really pretty amazing, and you can see in initial preview of it here: http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/32696814
Basically the entire page is made up of composite elements, each one is a first class item and addressable with its own URL. They can be dragged about the page on a grid as you see fit.
-Matt

Is Wiki Content Portable?

I'm thinking of starting a wiki, probably on a low cost LAMP hosting account. I'd like the option of exporting my content later in case I want to run it on IIS/ASP.NET down the line. I know in the weblog world, there's an open standard called BlogML which will let you export your blog content to an XML based format on one site and import it into another. Is there something similar with wikis?
The correct answer is ... "it depends".
It depends on which wiki you're using or planning to use. I've used various over the years MoinMoin was ok, used files rather than database, Ubuntu seem to like it. MediaWiki, everyone knows about and JAMWiki is a java clone(ish) of MediaWiki with the aim to be markup compatible with MediaWiki, both use databases and you can generally connect whichever database you want, JAMWiki is pre-configured to use an internal HSQLDB instance.
I recently converted about 80 pages from a MoinMoin wiki into JAMWiki pages and this was probably 90% handled by a tiny perl script I found somewhere (I'll provide a link if I can find it again). The other 10% was unfortunately a by-hand experience (they were of the utmost importance with them being recipies for the missus) ;-)
I also recently setup a Mediawiki instance for work and that took all of about 8 minutes to do. So that'd be my choice.
To answer your question I don't believe that there's such a standard as WikiML as Till called it.
As strange as it sounds, I've investigated screen scraping a wiki for a co-worker to help him port it to another wiki engine. It turned out that screen scraping would have been easier, quicker and more efficient to write to move this particular file based wiki to another one or a CMS.
Given the context that you wrote the question in I would bite the bullet now and pay the little extra for a windows hosted account and put Screwturn wiki on it. You're got the option of using file based or SQL Server based back end for it but because one of your requirements is low cost I'm guessing that you would use file based now for a cheaper hosted account and then you can always upscale the back end to SQL Server.
I haven't heard of WikiML.
I think your biggest obstacle is gonna be converting one wiki markup to another. For example, some wikis use markdown (which is what Stack Overflow uses), others use another markup syntax (e.g. BBCode, ...), etc.. The bottom line is - assuming the contents are databased it's not impossible to export and parse it to make it "fit" in another system. It might just be a pain in the ass.
And if the contents are not databased, it's gonna be a royal pain in the ass. :D
Another solution would be to stay with the same system. I am not sure what the reason is for changing the technology later on. It's not like a growing project requires IIS/ASP.NET all of the sudden. (It might just be the other way around.) But for example, if you could stick with PHP for a while, you could also run that on IIS.

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