Wikis, internationalisation and a touch of fame

I’ve been working at Symbian for some time now and have, among other things, become de-facto developer for their heavily-customised Mediawiki installation. In fact it holds about 1,400 content pages and over 30,000 edits at last count.

It’s now available in six major languages as part of the effort to open up Symbian development to the world at large (yes, especially Japan and China at the moment). The functionality was brought in by the Polyglot extension, which we then massively customised (and even fixed a couple of bugs – should probably submit them upstream actually). Most significantly was the edit hook to auto-add articles to an appropriate language category (this is how we solved grouping otherwise unrelated pages by languge in the wiki) if it detected the page was a translation [subpage] of the “root” (English) page.

Turns out Hamish gave me some lovely credits too on the Symbian Blog. How nice!

django-cms 2.0

Tempting fate a little, but I decided to go all out and convert declension.net to being fully CMS-enabled. Mutli-lingual CMS no less, after all the work I’ve been doing on my current contract with internationalisation (and its many, many gotchas) had convinced me that if you ain’t multilingual from the start, forget doing it properly. Of course, my Chinese / Arabic isn’t so hot so I’ll probably stick with English and some dubious French versions.

So still freshly confused and amazed by Django itself (and to a lesser extent python), it did seem a little bit risky to re-engineer the mostly-finished site that had templating, and a couple of self-contained apps already portfolio, this blog) already working, but you know, what the hell. Better than choosing yet another poxy colour scheme anyway. Plus: onwards, upwards – right?

What I needed now was a django-friendly python-based CMS that was neither pointlessly simple (write it yourself then) nor overly complex (plone anyone?). What I wish I’d found earlier was this comparison at djangoproject as I could have short-cut some dead ends. Still, now you can, right?

Well, having considered a couple the obvious choice was django cms. What would have saved much more of my time, was if I’d actually downloaded the same version that I was reading the docs for, and wondering WTF I was doing wrong. Seems like the project page only refers to the old version (1.x) which frankly isn’t that relevant any more as 2.0 (hosted on github) is clearly where it’s at, despite several annoying backwards-incompatible changes.