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[wiki] TextBook menu reorganisation
Following an email conversation with Destry, I’ve taken a stab at a revised organisation of the TextBook menu for comment, as follows (notes in brackets):
MENU
- home (similar layout + content to current design)
- introduction (history, concept, community contribution, future, etc.)
- installation (quick + detailed)
- template construction
- development (core code + plugins)
- using textpattern (written with the computer illiterate in mind!)
APPENDIXES
- faqs
- troubleshooting
- tag index
- resources
- glossary
The current sections (‘user contributions’, ‘utilities’, ‘toolbox’ and ‘personal tools’) could stand some amalgamation, I think … although not sure how feasible that is with the Mediawiki code.
Also, Destry suggested that the language options should be more prominent, and moved towards the top of the page. I think the choice of location for language selector depends partly on how Mediawiki handles it. If it’s a one-off selection and controlled by cookie, do language selectors need to sit in a ‘prime’ location when the vast majority will use it only once or not at all? Additionally, how many languages will there be?
David @ 1 Cog
“Follow the shoe!” … “No, follow the gourd!”
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Re: [wiki] TextBook menu reorganisation
David_1cog wrote: I think the choice of location for language selector depends partly on how Mediawiki handles it. If it’s a one-off selection and controlled by cookie, do language selectors need to sit in a ‘prime’ location when the vast majority will use it only once or not at all?
I can’t give you the nuts and bolts from MediaWiki’s side, but the manual side of the language link process is described here, How to Start a Language Translation Page. Basically, an author adds a little syntax to the bottom of a given page, and MediaWiki then automatically adds it to a generated list of language options for that page. The syntax has to be manually added for each language link needed, so that’s why they are added as people translate (otherwise you have a link that goes to an empty page). Media auto generates the link list within one of the portlets (that’s a backend thing, David should know what I’m talking about), which at the moment happens to be defined via XHTML+CSS to show up at the bottom of the left column. The process for setting all this up was counseled by Inspired, and it was a good way to get the language effort off the ground. It’s not a bad or difficult method, and it’s the same method used by Wikipedia, Wictionary, and all the others…we just need to implement it better.
Additionally, how many languages will there be?
There is no answer we can give here. MediaWiki supports many languages, but I doubt we’ll see much need for more languages than what is active in the International Users category of this forum, and probably much fewer than that (but I like to think anything is possible with time). At the moment, the real translation activity seems to be with the following:
- English
- French
- Italian
- Spanish
- German
If anyone has ideas how we can conveniently monitor stats on respective language pages in TextBook (e.g., pages per each language), that would be worthwhile.
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