[Pmwiki-users] new internationalization method, translators needed

[Patrick R. Michaud]

For pmwiki-0.6 I've made a change to the way internationalizations (i18n) 
can be loaded into PmWiki.  Previously i18n was performed by a series
of Cookbook scripts that loaded the translations; in the new system
the translations can come from a wiki page to make it easier to change
and extend the translation mechanism.

As examples, on the pmichaud.com site any PmWiki i18n group such as
"PmWikiFr", "PmWikiDe", "PmWikiIt", etc. can have a page called "XLPage"
that contains the translations to be used in PmWiki's various prompts and
processing.  I've already loaded the French (PmWikiFr.XLPage) and Italian 
(PmWikiIt.XLPage) pages from the Cookbook's i18n files.  In each of
these files there are some strings that still need to be translated
(volunteers, anyone?), and the translation files for the other languages
still need to be created (volunteers, anyone?).  To create a new
translation page, simply create the page "PmWikiXX.XLPage" where "XX"
is a two-character language code such as "De", "Es", etc.

Once these translation pages are complete, a site will be able to 
change PmWiki's language by simply adding the following to local.php 
(e.g., for French prompts):

   XLPage('fr','PmWikiFr.XLPage');

Multiple translation files can be loaded, so that a site can also
maintain a page of local translations separate from the ones that are
distributed with PmWiki (e.g., for Cookbook extensions).

This, coupled with the fact that PmWiki now allows accented letters
in page names, may make things a lot better for sites using
languages other than English.

Pm