CLWE Demo Screencast

The idea for this CLWE subproject is to put together a really good demo movie that showcases the current functionalities of CLWE in TikiWiki.

LPH, March 13: "A video to demonstrate the features would certainly be useful. A screencast would not only make a good demo for Mozilla and UN, but also be a great marketing tool for the website.

The only feature we really need to demonstrate is the change tracking workflow. A lot of small elements will be visible from it, like the new change quantification, the links for translators and all those things. The multilingual tags and structures are not quite as mature and don't aim for a really wide audience."

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Tracker item: here

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Rick Sapir has made (silent) Tiki screencasts: Video


This is based on the current 1.10 code in SVN.

Some questions:

1. On Frame 24, the Translation button is hidden by the right column. Shouldn't the bottom button bar wrap?
   • AD: You mean the frame where you use the Translate button to translate the English page for the first time, into Spanish? I don't know why the Translate button is invisible. Probably a problem with the Tiki Theme you are using. When we use the default Tiki theme, it seems to work fine.
     • RS: I'm using Tikineat. It looks like a FF issue. If you resize the browser, the middle column shrinks and the bottom bar does not wrap. Appears OK in IE.

1. On Frame 47, why does Tiki say:
   Updating 'Bienvenido' based on ''
   Shouldn't it say ...based on 'Welcome' instead?
   • AD: That's a bug. I think I fixed it last week. You might want to update from CVS.
   • RS: I just updated from SVN at 11:00am EST, and have the same issue.

1. On Frame 135, after assigning the German page to the translation group, why is it listed twice in the Page Translation module?
   • AD: Seems to be a bug. We didn't pay as much attention to this scenario (people creating a page and then afterwards assigning it as the translation to another existing page) as to the scenario where people created a new translation from the existing page. I will add a tracker item for that.
   • (I, AD, think LP wrote this): The content is in fact not synchronized at all. The other translations do not yet contain the content of the German page and the German page does not contain the content of the other pages. This is fully expected. A simple "Complete translation" both ways will do the trick. However, this is not really a standard path, so it probably should not be part of the screen cast. Instead, modifications should be made to various pages after the initial translation to show how the translation links work.
     • (I, AD, think that RS wrote this): I must be misunderstanding... The pages are identical. I would expect, when adding a page to a translation group, some sort of option/selection to indicate if the page is a complete or partial translation. You're saying that I still need to open both pages (DE and EN) and and select Complete? That seems like an extra 2 steps.
       
       I disagree that his is not the standard path — my translators for Smarties typically:
       1. View the source of an EN page.
       2. Copy the source to their local PC.
       3. Use some local editor to create the translation (Tiki's editor is simply too cumbersome for "special" characters and UTF encoding issues).
       4. Create a new wiki page for their translation
       5. Paste the text from their local PC to the wiki page.
       6. Assign the page to the existing translation set.
     • Maybe there is something else we should do then, because they really should use the translate link to do it properly. From there they can move to an external interface if they want to. The initial content contains the text to be translated and it should not have any encoding problems. The other alternative would be to allow to say the translations are complete when attaching the page, but I really don't see this as a natural workflow.
     • I, (AD), agree with RS's assessment. If I create a DE page and assign it to be the translation of EN, then I should be able to tell the system that the translation is complete, at the moment when I do this assignment. For example, instead of a single "Go" button, we should have a button that says "Assign as translation", with a check box beside it saying that "translation is complete" which would be checked by default (chances are that if the user created a DE page and is now ready to assign it as a translation, the translation is complete). Or, to be consistent with the translation editing interface, we could have two buttons, one that says "Assign as complete translation" and "Assign as partial translation".
     • Additionally, I don't understand why the DE page is listed twice in the Page Translation module: it is under both "Better" and "Need improvement." How can this be?
       • I, AD think this is a bug. Will create a tracker for that.
       • L-P: Not a bug. This is because the system does not force the pages to be in sync to add content. You could very well add a paragraph to the English page while someone else adds an other paragraph on the French page. The English page needs improvement because of the content on the French page, and the French page needs improvement because of the content on the English page. With the situation above, the content is simply disjoint.
       • AD: Oh, I think I see... When a user translates from say, En v2 to create DE v1, the translator is able to say that the translation is complete w.r.t. to En v2. But if the translator creates DE v1 complete separately from En, the system has no way of knowing which version of En the translator purported to have translated from. So we need to be careful and have the translator do a manual check of the DE page against the most recent version of say, the EN page. Maybe then, we need an extra step after the user has associated the DE to EN. This extra step would display both pages side by side and ask the translator to verify that they are inline. I'm almost tempted to leave that out for now, because I think this particular way of translating will be highly uncommon. We don't want to implement a whole bunch of functionality to support it.

Seb's notes, April 3

I think this is excellent and very showable. Great job all, especially Rick! Now, if we ever get around to making a new version at some point, here are a few suggestions that came to me as I watched the screencast.

Simplification details

Simplifying even further would help focus attention on the translation functionality. If at all possible, I would:
- Take out the Menu box on the left
- Take off the login box on the right.
- Take off the RSS link and icon at the bottom
- Reduce the number of languages offered to 4-5. Seeing all the languages at once is a bit overwhelming.

Cosmetic details

- At the start, the "Edit . Remove . Rename" boxes overflow to the right. (Need a wider page, if possible; Rick seems to say it looks OK in IE, then perhaps we justneed to do the demo in IE)
- Take off all the smileys, they're pretty distracting
- At about 1/6 of running time, we can't see the window contents in full, and need to scroll down and up later on. It would be ideal to find a way to be able to see everything and not scroll at all
- At 5/6 we get flashes where the Spanish text keeps changing magically
- Can we add some groovy music loop?

Grammar details in the commentary bubbles

- All fixed!

Code/bug details

- Heading says "Update 'Bienvenido' based on ''" instead of "based on 'Welcome' (apparently still unresolved in the code)
- "Translation in progress" sentence needs to be localized eventually. A small but important usability touch.
- "An urgent request for translation has been sent.... you can see a corrected version" — I believe "corrected" should read "correct", no?