summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/doc/plugins/contrib/po.mdwn
blob: af215a493c20030b7a26d746d7d4f4a50d070068 (plain)

I've been working on a plugin called "po", that adds support for multi-lingual wikis, translated with gettext, using po4a.

More information:

  • It can be found in my "po" branch: git clone git://repo.or.cz/ikiwiki/intrigeri.git
  • It involves adding three hooks to ikiwiki core.
  • It is documented (including TODO and plans for next work steps) in doc/plugins/po.mdwn, which can be found in the same branch.
  • No public demo site is available so far, I'm working on this.

My plan is to get this plugin clean enough to be included in ikiwiki.

The current version is a proof-of-concept, mature enough for me to dare submitting it here, but I'm prepared to hear various helpful remarks, and to rewrite parts of it as needed.

Any thoughts on this?

Well, I think it's pretty stunning what you've done here. Seems very complete and well thought out. I have not read the code in great detail yet.

Just using po files is an approach I've never seen tried with a wiki. I suspect it will work better for some wikis than others. For wikis that just want translations that match the master language as closely as possible and don't wander off and diverge, it seems perfect. (But what happens if someone edits the Discussion page of a translated page?)

Please keep me posted, when you get closer to having all issues solved and ready for merging I can do a review and hopefully help with the security items you listed. --[[Joey]]

Thanks a lot for your quick review, it's reassuring to hear such nice words from you. I did not want to design and write a full translation system, when tools such as gettext/po4a already have all the needed functionality, for cases where the master/slave languages paradigm fits. Integrating these tools into ikiwiki plugin system was a pleasure.

I'll tell you when I'm ready for merging, but in the meantime, I'd like you to review the changes I did to the core (3 added hooks). Can you please do this? If not, I'll go on and hope I'm not going to far in the wrong direction.

Sure.. I'm not completly happy with any of the hooks since they're very special purpose, and also since run_hooks is not the best interface for a hook that modifies a variable, where only the last hook run will actually do anything. It might be better to just wrap targetpage, bestlink, and beautify_urlpath. But, I noticed the other day that such wrappers around exported functions are only visible by plugins loaded after the plugin that defines them.

Update: Take a look at the new "Function overriding" section of [[plugins/write]]. I think you can just inject wrappers about a few ikiwiki functions, rather than adding hooks. The inject function is pretty insane^Wlow level, but seems to work great. --[[Joey]]

Thanks a lot, it seems to be a nice interface for what I was trying to achieve. I may be forced to wait two long weeks before I have a chance to confirm this. Stay tuned. --[[intrigeri]]

I've updated the plugin to use inject. It is now fully self-contained, and does not modify the core anymore. --[[intrigeri]]

The Discussion pages issue is something I am not sure about yet. But I will probably decide that "slave" pages, being only translations, don't deserve a discussion page: the discussion should happen in the language in which the pages are written for real, which is the "master" one. --[[intrigeri]]

I think that's a good decision, you don't want to translate discussion, and if the discussion page turns out multilingual, well, se la vi. ;-)

Relatedly, what happens if a translated page has a broken link, and you click on it to edit it? Seems you'd first have to create a master page and could only then translate it, right? I wonder if this will be clear though to the user.

And also, is there any way to start a translation of a page into a new lanauge using the web interface?

FWIW, I'm tracking your po branch in ikiwiki master git in the po branch. One thing I'd like to try in there is setting up a translated basewiki, which seems like it should be pretty easy to do, and would be a great demo! --[[Joey]]