Bug#461617: ITP: wordpress-fr -- award winning weblog manager (French language version)

[Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel@mamane.lu>]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 10:09:13AM +0000, Kai Hendry wrote:

> I am not fond of the need of a separate package just to support
> French. Could we please investigate how to offer French (or any
> other language for that matter) in Wordpress native?

Sure, I'd be happy to find a better solution. I'll separate the
solutions in two groups:

 - packaging work
 - upstream/forking work

For the solutions that involve only packaging work, the most
straightforward would be for the wordpress package to use a repackaged
upstream tarball that includes the current .orig.tar.gz plus the files
shipped by my wordpress-fr binary package. If you would be willing to
do that in the wordpress package,
then:

 - I'm willing to become "comaintainer in charge of French affairs"
   for the wordpress package.
 - I'd like to include some very small code changes that are in the
   upstream French wordpress, enhance French support without impacting
   an English wordpress.
 - Do you maintain the package in some kind of VCS (in a form where I
   can get commit access to it)? If not, our collaboration would be
   easier if we did. I'm OK with (as in "if you insist, I'll accept")
   most any distributed system, such as git, mercurial, darcs, bzr,
   GNU arch, ... Even subversion if you insist really hard. I'd like
   to avoid subversion and darcs if possible.

For the solutions that involve upstream work, that is enhancement to
the source code itself that would lead to a de facto fork if upstream
doesn't integrate the patch and we keep forward-porting these
enhancements to newer upstream versions:

 - I've no real interest in being involved in a long-time fork; if we
   go that route, I'd much prefer we do it hand-in-hand with upstream
   and have at least reasonable hope they would integrate our changes.

 - One step: Internationalise (convert to gettext) all remaining
   strings in the code. (Such as "could not connect to database", the
   initial blog setup process, ...)

 - Another step: Gettextise strings in themes (or at least the default
   theme).

> Though I don't like `define ('WPLANG', '');`. This should be set by
> whatever the language is set to in the HTTP headers by the browser,
> no?

Possibly, but not necessarily. I suggest that we add (if it doesn't
exist yet) a PHP function "get_http_preferred_language_among" (it needs
a better name), that would take as arguments a list of "supported"
languages (or a special value for "all"/"any") and returns the highest
ranked in the HTTP headers among those. Then the admin could have:

define ('WPLANG', get_http_preferred_language_among['fr', 'de', 'en']);

and the user would get his favourite language among those. Or the
admin could have

define ('WPLANG', 'fr');

if he wants to force his website to French. (The really optimal thing
would make this choice per string, depending on what translations are
available for every string, but that is more work to implement. Or
maybe not, because it would lead to mixed-languages websites where one
string is in English, the other in French and another one in German.)

-- 
Lionel