Evaluation of current TikiWiki multilingual support as of Jan 6 2008

Below is an evaluation of current multilingual support in TikiWiki, as of Jan 6, 2008, in terms of a number of user tasks

Task: Specify set of languages supported by the site DONE

• I18n Setup screen
  • 'Language' caption should be 'Default language'
  • 'Best Language' should be 'Show pages in user's preferred language'
  • 'Reg users can change the language' should say 'Other supported languages'. Also, is the checbox needed at all? If the site supports multiple languages, don't you always want to allow users to specify language preferences?

Task: Write a page in a particular language

• Q: When save a newly created page, language is by default Unknown.
• Would it be better if it was the main language of the site? Or the preferred language of the user?

Task: Specify language of a newly created page

• Easy enough.

Task: Edit page in a particular language

• Just the normal edit dialog.

Task: Initial Translation of page into a given language

• Current process is to create the translation, assign it a language, then assign it to be the translation of the source page.
  • Modified: From the "Translation" page, it is now possible to create a new wiki page and attach it as a translation as soon as it's saved.
• Would be better if the Translate link on a page say, English, allows you to specify a language, say French, and its name in French, then the system pastes the English content into the French version (with a note on top that says "En cours de traduction").
• Actually it's the way it's done in 1.0, but the dialog needs some rewording. All that's left to do is for the system to paste the source content into the newly created target language version.
• Also, the pasted content should automatically translate links when it knows the name of the translation, and in other cases, mark the link as {Translation of: Original Name}.
• May also still need some features to manually associate an existing page to its translation, but this would be for more exceptional cases than the norm.

Task: Tie a newly created translation to the source language version.

Task: Site visitor specifies his language preferences

• User goes into 'Preferences' menu of the Tiki site.
• Or, he can do it in Firefox.
• The Tiki preferences override Firefox preferences.
• BUT: Right now, Tiki only has ONE preferred language. It would be better if there was an ORDER of preferred languages.

Task: Site visitor is made aware that the site is multilingual

• At the top of each page, you have a drop down list of languages.
• Need to make sure that this drop list is ALWAYS PROMINENTLY DISPLAYED, no matter what template is used.
• Should it be a drop down list, because you only see one language at a time and it's not clear that it's multilngual.
• On the other hand, if you have 10 languages, it takes lots of real estate.
• Maybe up to 3 languages displayed, with a forth "Other".
• Should not be confusable with the system language drop down (i.e. language that the menus are displayed in).

Task: Site visitor switches to another language version of a page

• That's just picking a language from the drop down list.