Internationalisation

Context

Wikifab use the mediawiki extension 'PageForm' https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Page_Forms (extensions previously called SemanticsForm).

This enabled us to create forms templates in order that users create new pages with a predefined form.

However, this extensions is not well integrated we the 'Translate' extension, which enable to have a multilingual website.

Today, wikifab has 2 websites :

• http://beta.wikifab.org : the first version in french
• http://en.wikifab.org : the english version

This requires that users create one account on each platform, and tutorials must be created separately on each site.

We want to have only one website, with translation features included. So that every tutorial can be easily translate to be available in many languages.

So, we want to update the PageForm extension to be properly integrated with the Translate extension.

Installation guide

An example of wikifab website with extension 'Translate' enabled is available here : http://i18n.test.wikifab.org/

To develop this feature, you can install a local version of wikifab on your computer or one of your server. You can either install a wikifab wiki and add Translate extension, or just install a mediawiki with Translate and PageForm extensions. The first option enable you to have already some forms templates to create tutorials.

Install wikifab site

Follow the tutorial here : https://github.com/Wikifab/wikifab-main

Then install Mediawiki extension 'Translate', see instructions here : https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Language_Extension_Bundle

Install empty mediawiki with extension Translate and PageForm

Here are the commands to install ( proccess for ubuntu)

wget https://releases.wikimedia.org/mediawiki/1.27/mediawiki-1.27.1.tar.gz
tar -xzf mediawiki-1.27.1.tar.gz
mv mediawiki-1.27.1 translation.wikifab
cd translation.wikifab
cd extensions
git clone https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-PageForms PageForms

And install Mediawiki extension Translate : https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Language_Extension_Bundle

How the extension 'Translate' works

To translate content of a page, we must edit the page, and add tags <translate>...</translate> to wrap the text to translate, save the page, then Click the "Mark this page for translation" link.

Then it show you the translation units, and here is the trouble for wikifab : it doesn't respect the PageForm fields.

After valid it, texts blocs to translate appear on the special page 'Translate'.

To do

automatically add 'translate' tags

• Tags should be added either at page creation, or on a click on a specific action button.
• Tags should be added around each field to be translated.
• Tags should not be visible on edition of page with forms.

improve translation forms

After adding tags, all pages could be translated. But the translate form is not very good : each text block must be translate one by one, and we havn't a vision of the global page.

So we should create a translation form, which use a specific template, in the same way than we use form to create a tutorial page.