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Lussumo Vanilla pros and cons from my point of view
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Hi,
First of all let me introduce myself. I am Jaakko Salonen, a computer science student from the heart of Finland. The reasons why I have noticed Lussumo Vanilla, put it into test and given my time to explore your makings are because you guys have made a forum software that:
a) really has an extensible architecture
a) really cares about valid and semanticly correct mark up
b) really tries to maintain device independency and
c) really concentrates on the reason why people need forums (instead of bloating the software with the nice-to-have-features).
There is, however, a thing I hope you would improve: the freedom of degree in localisation.
I already posted a bug report about an issue with Global Application settings form. After that I also gave a look on your way of supporting the localisation. I gave a quick test of how I could do a Finnish locale, but ran quite fast into problems.
You have split up some of the UI texts into a collection of shorted texts. For example there is a general entity in dictionary for the word "for" and "to". It seems that this would be a convenient way to make the locale shorter, describing the UI text in a more abstract manner.
For example if you make a UI text up from three parts which are "Back", "to", "Discussions". In english appending all these three will create a grammaticly correct sentence: Back to Discussions.
However in many languages, especially in Finnish, things are not that simple. Especially Prepositions (to, from, etc). also affect the words they are referring to. For example discussions is "keskustelut" in Finland and "to discussion" is "keskusteluihin". So there is no actually a physical word for the meaning of "to", but instead a set of rules how to make postpositional changes to the word that is being referred to.
So what I'm trying to say is that please: do not make any system wide assumptions about language grammatics by splitting UI text sentences into shorter clips of texts. Keep all the texts, even redundantly, in the context instead. So for example if you have to localise sorting options, like "sort by name", "sort by date" don't split them into smaller bits like "sort by", "name" and "date". Of course it is reduntant in english, but remember thats not always the case.
Of course I'm whining, but really not because of there is much to whine about, but because Lussumo Vanilla is so awesome that it is easy to concentrate on the few minor flaws it has :) So don't take my bitter babble too personally - you have already gave really nice effort!
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The localization in Vanilla 0.9.2 (or "Vanilla Beta" I guess it should be called from now on) was very much an afterthought. It was added to the system about one week before it was originally launched last year.
The new localization code has replaced these string concatenations with full sentences that have replacement codes within. So, a good example of this code is from the global application settings form:
$Context->Dictionary['XCommentsYSecondsZFreeze'] = 'Members cannot post more than //1 comments within //2 seconds or their account will be frozen for //3 seconds.';So, in this example, when the definition is rendered, the //1 //2 and //3 characters will be replaced with the appropriate text/code. This allows you to translate the string to whatever language you wish and place the text wherever it needs to go.