Re: [libreoffice-website] An Observation

Hi Michael, *,

On Mon, Nov 7, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Michael Bauer <fios@akerbeltz.org> wrote:
> 07/11/2011 09:10, sgrìobh Erich Christian:
> > >  nor does it in fact even
> > >  have old fashioned links to localised sites.
> > http://www.libreoffice.org/international-sites/
>
> Erm without wanting to sound glib or anything but the fact I've just spent
> quite a bit of time building the Gaelic site off the English site tells us
> one thing - no-one ever gets that far to the right in the menu bar, and if
> we want visitors to the International Sites, then that needs to be pushed in
> front of the user somehow *before* they've read it all in English.

Well - I blame it once again on the history of building the site.
At the very beginning, my idea was to use silverstripe's translation
feature, and have only one single "domain", i.e. www.libreoffice.org
that would have the english pages translated into various languages,
and only have <nl-project>.libreoffice.org for stuff that really is
only specific to the corresponding community behind the project.

But at that time, it just didn't work out, that feature wasn't used
and people did prefer to have their  own sites and create their own
structure. As silverstripe's translation feature doesn't work across
subsites (at least not out-of-the box, and there haven't been any
volunteers to work on the php code to change this), the current
"process" was established.

I.e. nl-sites just use the english structure as a guide for their own
content, in effect many nl-projects do end up in "just" translating
the english site, also your proposal strongly suggests that.

However: How would you put the nl-project's pages in the face of
visitors? Just redirecting to <nl>.libreoffice.org won't do - as many
are still in heavy constructions, only have a tiny fraction of the
content available on the english site, and people were against putting
a list of locales in the header/footer for similar reasons.

> International Sites... good question, why did I never click on it... I don't
> know, it just didn't sound like "This site in your language".

Because it is not. It is not "the content of www.libreoffice.org
translated into <anther language>" (as written above it mostly ended
up like this). But even while there are a couple of projects that did
copy more or less all of the content, there are many that only have a
limited set of pages, starting with a homepage and a download page....

> Dunno. Most
> sites make it much clearer somehow that you can get this in your language.

Well - if you got some concrete proposal - just shoot. (probably in a
new thread)

One idea would be to replace the mimetype-icon-banner that I hacked up
as a replacement for the OOo-Con banner for a "hey, look at our
native-lang sites" banner. But then there should be a more elaborate
page than the "International sites" page, like a page with a (very)
short introduction to the corresponding nl-team (one-man-show vs huge
community and what to expect from the nl-site: niche information on
the nl-project, or a full-blown copy of the English site).

Anyway - if you can put those ideas into a concrete proposal, don't
hesitate :-) Seems like the website-related discussions are dormant
anyway, need to revive the process again. (esp. with the redesign of
the download-page)

(Note that the entries on the "International sites" page are not
quality checked or otherwise created by a human. If the project was
created, it is listed, and if there is a homepage defined for that
domain, it has an active link, no matter whether it contains useful
content or a placeholder only)

Similarily, if you miss some css styles that might be useful for the
whole project, don't hesitate and ask for them to be added.
While Ivan did a great job with the initial set of highlighting
styles, It seems to me that almost nobody makes use of them.

ciao
Christian

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