Attention: We are retiring the ASP.NET Community Blogs.
Learn more >
OSS and localization
I've been visiting Panamá for almost two months now (alas, a really nice place to visit). During this time we've started the .NET User Group here. We used DotNetNuke to create the portal, and it has proved to be an amazing piece of software (for being free and, even more so, running flawlessly in really unexpensive hosts). But we had to set up the site in Spanish, so we had two localize DNN: it took a couple of nights to understand the inner workings of DNN and a couple more to translate 90% of the labels and messages. A lot of the text was in database tables already but we had text scattered through the code, the user controls and the pages. In the end, the localization process was not a big deal but it still required the source code and some good expertise in ASP.NET. As I said, DNN is an amazingly good product but one item below average is its discussions module, so we started to hunt for a third party module (it's a tribute to DNN popularity the fact that there's a market for 3rd party modules and site development), we found a couple of interesting options like YAF which is OSS and ActiveForums which is commercial (but you can buy the code) but again no easy localization. Come to think of it, of the growing number of OSS .NET projects, most of them only target the English language with i18n going from poor to non-existant. Message to Microsoft: tell the thriving .NET OSS community to start thinking multicultural.
3 Comments
Great point, Edgar.
I never thought much about it until we had a developer from Germany join up. We now have localization on our list for nGallery, in a coming release. :)
-Jason (jason@ngallery.org)
Edgar, thanks for bringing this up. ActiveForums has only been out for about 30 days now. I really didn't expect for there to be so much international interest. I'm looking into adding localization in the next release.
Regards,
Will
Actually, I think OSS is more popular outside the USA. It's good to hear you are planning to add localization in your next releases. By the way, if you need an extra hand, let me know.