Hello,
Well, first since I am new to this list let me introduce myself.
My name is Andrew Jensen, my friends and hopefully you therefore call me
Drew. I have been a user of the OpenOffice.org software since just
before the first 2.0 release. This is both personal and professional
usage and includes support to a number of people in my local area. That
area being Cumberland, MD USA.
My main area of interest is with the Base module and use of the
application in small business and professional office settings. I am
fairly active with the Base project primarily in a 'nagging' role on the
mailing lists, also as a member of ooQA-TeamDatabase
<http://qa.openoffice.org/ooQAReloaded/DatabaseTeamsite/ooQA-TeamDatabase.html>.
Other projects I am active on to one degree or another are Documentation
and BizDev. Also, during this time I became quite active at OOoForum and
this brings me to the point of this email.
You most likely saw the announcement regarding the latest user forum
located at
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum
This new site is the direct result of the efforts of a number of
moderators and active members from OooForum.org site looking to, among
other things, enhance the features available to OpenOffice.org users. As
you may know this is a new site and not a replacement for OOoForum.org
and all of those working on this new site are still active at the other.
Presently, I serve as one of the site administrators at the new site and
as such would like to discuss with you here how it might better address
the needs of the international OpenOffice.org user base.
With that in mind certain decisions where made on the platform selected
for the forum. The site is hosted on a dedicated server in the SUN
Hamburg facility, in the services.openoffice.org domain. PostgreSQL was
selected as the rdbms with full support for UTF-8 for all database
functions and phpBB 3 was selected for the forum package. This later
choice, among other reasons, because of the wide array of language packs
supported and available and for the it's use of CSS and UTF-8 character
encoding in the default UI themes. Further the package has a well
defined way to build new language packs and specific end user tools to
do so.
There are number of subjects then that I would like to bring up for your
input on:
First - the ability to display the UI for the English language forum in
a user's native language. To be honest this was something that didn't
really register with me when setting up the board, meaning I did not
expect it to be a big request, but it has come up from a number of
different sources already. So, this can be done - with a few caveats,
perhaps I should say, that it will require a few steps along the way to
get full coverage of the UI. But the first steps have already been taken.
Second - What was contemplated when this site was developed - the
ability to work with the different Native Language teams to build a user
forum in their language, for their user base. In other words where there
is .../en/forum only at the moment, there could also be .../es/forum for
Spanish .../jp/forum for Japanese etc. In this situation each forum
would have a separate repository for user posts, but a common user
registration database would be used. So when a user registers with any
of the forums at the site they can automatically switch between all
others on the site, without having to register with each.
In this situation what is being offered is that the current site
management team would act as a service provider to the native language
team - setting up the infrastructure for the forum, handling the back
end functions for backups, upgrades and such. What would be needed from
the Native Language team would be individuals to act as content managers
- at least one person as a forum administrator and one as a forum
moderator. Specific functions of each can be discussed as needed, but
for the most part this means being the individuals that would handle
user level issues in the actual language used at the forum.
Well - I suppose at this point I'll stop and take any questions folks
might have or start discussing specifics.
Let me finish however with this - there is currently a test forum set up
on the Native Language tests. The following language packages are
installed now:
Arabic العربية
Danish Dansk
Bulgarian Български
Czech Čeština
German (Casual Honorifics) Deutsch (Du)
Spanish (Argentina) Spanish (Argentina)
Finnish Suomi
French (Standard) Français (Standard)
Galician Galego
Hebrew עברית
Croatian Hrvatski
Hungarian Magyar
Italian Italiano
Dutch Nederlands
Polish Polski
Portuguese Português
Portuguese (Brazil) Português (Brasil)
Russian Русский
Slovak Slovenčina
Serbian (Latin script) Serbian (Latin script)
Swedish Svenska
Turkish Türkçe
These languages packs will be added over the next few days:
NOTE these are from either the official phpBB international site, or the
respective national support sties:
Spanish ( Es )
Spanish ( Es )
Japanese
*日本語*
Chinese ( Simplified )
*简体中文*
Chinese ( Traditional )
*正體官話*
Thai *ไทย*
Vietnamse
I am looking forward to hearing from folks.
Anyone interested in helping check these language packs, please contact
me - I'll set you up for access on the test forum ASAP.
Sincerely,
Drew Jensen
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