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With 33 150-page sites in 20 different languages and in 33 different domains, two items stood out as being absolutely crucial. License cost and getting the 5.000 pages of the existing sites automatically imported into a database. So we ordered a custom made system from an experienced programmer.
The system was delivered yesterday along with its complete imported database contents and it looks absolutely fantastic. The page contents have been broken down into snippets such as Title, Description, Meta keywords, Page anchor text, Header and Sub-header, Text paragraph(s), Special text alerts 1 and 2, a wide variety of product facts, location of images and maps etc. The English text is shown alongside each, making the translation work really user friendly and easy.
Any change to the English original pages will trigger alerts to the translators that work has to be done and where it needs to be done. These flags are added into one ToDo-list for each language and translator progress can be monitored very easily. There are four access levels with different login and password for each translator and duplicate back-up systems. Plus quite a few frills, including an online manual.
When a language version is completely updated, we simply click a button to ask the system to generate static html files and upload them to the server. The resulting code is extremely clean, relying on external style sheets without any styles on-page.
The cost? Just 21.000 Euros equal to about $30.500. We are only at version 0.98 Alfa as yet, but it already looks like money well spent.
A custom PHP something?
A fork of an existing framework?
Python?
Just curious what the programming language the programmer is using and if he started from scratch or is customizing something that was existing.
Glad to hear it worked out for you.
Usually it comes down to 'who' you get more then what you use. If you get the right person good things can happen. Even with the best system, if you have someone who doesn't know what they are doing, they can mess it up.
[edited by: Demaestro at 4:12 pm (utc) on Dec. 20, 2007]
>what the system is built on?
It's built on Perl and MySQL, basically from scratch. It uses tinymce for WYSIWYG editing of HTML snippets. It doesn't use cpan modules, other then Algorithm:Diff to show what differences there are between versions of items.
[edited by: Damian at 5:02 pm (utc) on Dec. 20, 2007]
[Edit: Oops, he beat me to it]
Like I said it usually comes down to who you get more then what they use.... and if you are doing a diff for versions then that means you implemented versions which to me sounds like you know what you are doing.
That is awesome.. did you two meet on here?
[edited by: Demaestro at 5:10 pm (utc) on Dec. 20, 2007]
It's built on Perl and MySQL, basically from scratch. It uses tinymce for WYSIWYG editing of HTML snippets. It doesn't use cpan modules, other then Algorithm:Diff to show what differences there are between versions of items.
no CGI?
no DBI?
what a stud!
It actually does use DBI to connect to MySQL, and File::Copy for copying some backup files back and forth.
During development I used CGI:Carp:fatalsToBrowser, and for the one-time importing of data I used Encode and Unicode::Normalize, and even a PC based UTF8 converter for the worst cases, to prepare the HTML files for the importing.
