Ahmad Alfy: Multilingual Support, Speaking your user's language!

Ahmad Alfy describes a first-hand experience that underlines the importance of getting your Extensions ready for Multi-lingual support:

Recently I was working on a website using Dutch as a default language. I logged in to the administration panel and started to work. The backend was in Dutch but I assumed everything will be OK since I work with Joomla almost everyday!! So I know the location of every thing and the icons will help etc ... I thought "It's OK, I will figure it out!". Three minutes later I was frustrated and took more time to do simple tasks. I logged out then logged in after choosing English instead of default; Work became easier after that.

Then, the remaining portion of his post explains why he is a valuable member of the Joomla! community. He shared learning resources Joomla! developers can use to easily build multilingual ready Joomla! Extensions.

Way-to-go Ahmad!

Comment by Ahmad Alfy on October 21, 2009 at 10:36am: Thank you for the post and for your effort Amy :)
I didn't thought I can publish this here cause it's very basic!

Comment by Amy Stephen on October 21, 2009 at 10:42am: You know, everything is basic once you know how. There are many who don't and for them your instructions are very helpful. Thanks for the resource!

Comment by Marcos Peebles on October 21, 2009 at 12:17pm: Living in Belgium and in Brussels, we deal with 90% of our sites being multilingual (fr/nl and often en).
This is very good info Ahmad, thank you for sharing your knowledge!

Myself speaking quite a few languages I generally don't have probs understanding what is what, but I can assure you that I've abandoned quite a few good components and plugins because they were not thought from scratch as mutlilingual. When I say abandoned I also include all the ones bought (you have to buy before testing in a lot of cases) and simply not used and stored in my 'will-see/will-do' list (not blaming anyone, just telling what I do).

When a client asks for a site, we all know it takes X hours (and reality is more then often X hours mutiplied by 1.5) to build a site. When things "don't work" (ie in EN all fine then NL ...not) you add to that another percentage understanding the culprit, debugging or simply (re)building the files, well you end up ... not doing it or waiting for it to "happen". Quite frustrating when you KNOW you could do it but economically you can't...

So this is imho and from my multilingual perspective a must, thanks Ahmad!

Comment by Ahmad Alfy on October 21, 2009 at 12:43pm: I have similar experience since I live in Egypt and build a lot of websites in Arabic.

Translations for Arabic aren't always available... I start to see if I can translate the extension then submit it to the developer.. Then I got killed by the fact the developer dirty coded the extension :(

Waiting for it to "happen" -as you mentioned- always end up with losing the project or unsatisfactory result for the client. I would say we can spend some of our spare time (if any!) in making extensions ready for internationalization and share it with the developer. The whole community will be thankful for you.

Or maybe contacting the developer's first to see if he's gonna adopt your participation and continue his extension with your valuable modification :)

Comment by Ahmad Alfy on October 21, 2009 at 12:44pm: btw I rofled when you said

X hours mutiplied by 1.5

Comment by Marcos Peebles on October 21, 2009 at 1:13pm: One could kindly suggest to JDE to include these practices to validate ;-) or more 'realistically' to add it in the adding multi-language support for Joomla!, topic which btw is quite obscure to find imho... could be more highlighted.

ps: 1.5 ratio without clients delay of course, otherwise you can multiply by a nice 2.5 :-P

Comment by Marcos Peebles on October 21, 2009 at 1:18pm: Ow, and when I say "waiting it to happen" I actually meant that of course you did find another way to do it but without the nice extension you wanted to use... And it is always scary to share your dirty hacks (or even proper coding) when you're unsure about what you did but the thing just 'worked' on that particular site. No one likes to be flamed for 'bad coding', it is somehow a 'psychological step' to overcome when you know you're not the best coder (if coder) around...

Ahmad Alfy: Multilingual Support, Speaking your user's language!

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