Jim DeLaHunt, world-ready

A Vancouver Joomla User Group started up recently. We’re experimenting with what format will serve us well. For this month’s meeting, I’ll give a talk about staging servers (details below) and we’ll have plenty of time for networking and Q&A. I there there’s lots of room for more Joomla content in this town. Here’s the coordinates:

Going live: adding a staging server to your Joomla development process

Thursday, 8. October 2009, 18:30-20:30hAt The Network Hub, 422 Richards Street, 3rd floor, Vancouver, BC V6B 2Z3. tel +1 604 767 8778.

A monthly meeting of the Vancouver Joomla User Group. Admission free. All people interested in learning more about the Joomla! content management system, and helping others learn more, are welcome.

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Last week I gave a presentation, International and multilingual Drupal and Joomla! sites. I’ve posted my slides and handouts at that link for anyone who wants to catch up on them.

The occasion was LinuxFest Northwest 2009, held at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA, USA. It was a delightful event. It’s thoroughly grassroots and volunteer, it has a friendly and accessible vibe, yet it attracts very knowledgeable people.

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I gave a presentation about “International and multilingual Drupal sites” to the friendly folks at the Vancouver Drupal Users Group on November 20, 2008. Follow the link above to see the slides.

This was a great opportunity for me to investigate Drupal 6’s internationalisation (i18n). As part of the research for my paper, I set up a basic Drupal 6 site with UI strings and content translated into Japanese and English languages. I found that Drupal 6 has very good support for multilingual site hosting. However, there were some tricky aspects to installing the right modules and then setting up the system configuration. I summarise them in the presentation, but it’s probably worth writing some better documentation.

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There is a Joomla! Day in Vancouver this Saturday. I’ll be giving a brief presentation, on jdlh.com as an example of a multilingual Joomla! website, with human-friendly URLs.

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Oh right, I forgot to mention: I’ve been accepted to present to the 32nd Internationalization & Unicode Conference this September! I’m presenting on a topic which I’ve been working on lately: multilingual websites. The title is: Web 2.0 goes to Babel: Multilingual websites and user-supplied content.

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I want my site, jdlh.com, to be a multilingual site that communicates the business I want to do and lets me explore the tools for being world-ready. For nearly two years, I’ve worked to get a combination of tools that would do the job. I’m happy to say that this week I finally assembled a plausible solution. The final piece was sh404SEF, after some patching, with Joomla! 1.0.x and Joom!Fish.

Language support on jdlh.com

jdlh.com supports content in multiple languages (English, Japanese, and German so far), and also a user interface in multiple languages (the same three now, but could differ). Each URL can include a language code between the domain name (”jdlh.com”) and the path to the content. The language codes look like “/en/” for English, “/de/” for German, and “/ja/” for Japanese. The codes are based on RFC 3066 . Where there is a language code in a URL, the site presents content localised for that language, to the extent possible. The content may not always available in that language, so the site may present the content in a fall-back language.

Where there is no language code in a URL, especially in the basic domain name http://jdlh.com/, the site looks at the HTTP Accept-Language header to determine which language the user prefers, and redirects the browser to content with that language code.

It’s important to me that the URLs of content on my site be  concise, comprehensible to humans, and stable over time. I like Jakob Nielsen’s “URL as UI” column, and the W3C’s “Cool URIs don’t change“, and try to follow them.

Software used on jdlh.com

jdlh.com is built using Joomla!, a free software content management system (CMS). Version 1.0.x of Joomla!, which I use as of early 2008, can be coaxed into using UTF-8 text encoding and tolerating multi-lingual content. I add in Joom!Fish, a Joomla component which helps manage content in multiple parallel languages, and provides useful language utilities like that UI widget at the top of the page, to select between languages.

Joomla has many strengths, but easy-to-read URLs aren’t among them. Left to itself, a Joomla URL is an opaque stream of numbers and codes. Turning those URLs into human-friendly URLs, which are concise, comprehensible to humans, and stable over time is the work of a “SEF” (Search-Engine-Friendly) component. Joomla has had several, but the first which satisifed us for jdlh.com is one called sh404SEF (see also sh404SEF on Joomla extensions and sh404SEF on siliana.net).

There has been a tough interaction between Joomla, Joom!Fish, and sh404SEF (and its ill-starred predecessors). Since mid-2006, Joomla would work with either of the other two, but not both together. Even as Joomla! moved forward to version 1.5.x, which has a better foundation for multilingual sites, I was held back to Joomla 1.0.x because Joom!Fish didn’t support the new version yet. Finally, in late February 2008, I discovered version 1.3.1 “TEST PR build 255″ of sh404SEF, which seemed to work well with Joom!Fish (currently 1.8.2) and Joomla (currently 1.0.15).

I made a patch to sh404SEF, one of the modules that extends the Joomla! content management system that runs this website. What the patch does is to ensure that all three of the languages supported on this website are treated equally in the URLs of this site. Without the patch, the “/en/” tag for URLs of English-language content would be missing in some cases. See my article “Default-language patch for sh404SEF published” for a description of the patch, and a link to the code.

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