[kdewebdev-site] Proposed PHP infrastructure

[jacob coby]

Most of my questions were already asked by Bill, but I
still have a few:

- Is it too complex?  OSS doesn't work like commercial
development; you can't rely on one person to stick
around for months or years.  How long will it take to
bring a person up to snuff with this system?  Is it so
complex that it will put off people who want to help? 

- There was mention of emailing the translation files
to the translators.  Is there a way to see what's in
the queue to be translated, so anyone can come along
and do the work?  We might need something simple
translated into a (relatively) obscure language, and
the translator might not be 100% reliable.  I may just
need to have "Click Here" translated to Czech.  It may
be faster to just use babelfish and do it myself
instead of waiting a week for the guy in cz to make it
to the internet cafe to translate the string.

- Someone mentioned that the main KDE site uses some
system similar to this now?  Why are we re-inventing
the wheel here?  The KDE site backend is sure to get
more testing and more fixes/patches than whatever we
do will.  The KDE backend is known to work.  Do we
want to develop a website, or do we want to develop a
whole development/deployment environment along with a
website?  

- How well will this work with Quanta's VPL?  I don't
think I understand how these XML files get converted
to PHP without running some sort of script? 

- In the example, why the need to define whether a
link is a file or a dir?  If it ends in "/", it's a
dir (per the URI RFC).  Is 'true' a dir or a file? 
Things like that add complexity, and make it harder
for a new dev to come up to speed.  Is it indictive of
other things that need to be addressed?

It does have some things that I like:

- Forces correct XHTML.  It's easy to fall back on old
habits and include display with content.  Even in the
example, he uses the <b> and <i> tags, which is a
no-no.  With this system, you write content, and then
add CSS later. 

- It seems pretty clean.  <i18n>string</i18n> is
easier to understand and parse than
<?=gettext("string")?>, and especially <?php print
gettext("string"); ?>.

- I like that i18n support is built-in.

=====
--
-Jacob

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