Multi-language

In the three years of running this site, I don't think I've ever been so far behind in responding to my emails.  My apologies for those that have tried to catch my attention over the past several weeks.  So let's talk about some of those emails I found in the neglected mailbag at CMS Report.

The first email is from Adam Strzelecki from nanoANT regarding his latest product, CMSity.

I am single person company nanoANT. I just wonder if you would mind posting some news about my latest project at your site.

Recently I have released my new CMS engine to the public at http://www.cmsity.com/.

CMSity is very small PHP CMS 200KB engine (150KB source code) + 40KB templates, but powerful. It gives you static pages, downloads, blog, forums, tags, attachments and RSS functionality out of the box absolutely for free (with Free license). While there's extra paid Pro version extending functionality with advanced access control, and multi-language sites.
It was written with flexibility and performance in mind all by myself. The objective was to satisfy most of the users with Free version while to have some small revenue on Pro from enterprise users.

You may have a look at latest most notable deployment of CMSity at http://www.allplayer.org/

Best regards, Adam.

Some of the features and requirements for CMSity include:

• Engine code ~190KB, templates ~70KB
• PHP 4.x, 5.x compatible, MySQL 4.x, 5.x compatible
• SEO optimizations and user friendly URLs
• Multi-language
• Blog, forums and multiple users functionality
• Page and user tags
• Flexible templates
• Template and tag based access control

Best of luck to CMSity.  I also hope people comment if they are aware of this CMS as well as sites that have been built on CMSity.

Hot on the heels of SilverStripe 2.3.0 comes an update that resolves some bugs, adds support for six more languages in the CMS, and launches two great new features.

• Addtional languages supported include: Catalan (Andorra), English (United Kingdom), Spanish (Mexico), Indonesian (Indonesia), Bokmål (Norway), and Serbian (Serbia).
• Mollom is a smart and cheap way to reduce unwanted comments and other website spam. It uses a combination of bayesian filters and CAPTCHAs to protect forms on your website.
• This means you can now install SilverStripe on Microsoft IIS 5.1 and 6.0 (which don't have native URL Rewriters). It also helps those having difficulties with the free URL rewriters on Apache and Lighttpd.

Complete Story

Amit from Joomlatools contacted me to introduce me to their new company as well as their new product, Nooku.  The introduction is somewhat ironic given the fact that Johan already contacted me last Spring.  I have also had a link to Joomlatools' blogs in my Blogroll for a number of months!

However, it sounds like they're doing exciting stuff over at Joomlatools that should make quite a bit of the Joomla! community happy.  Nooku looks like a great product and the extension/framework should help Joomla! 1.5 users create multi-lingual websites more easily. I wish the best for Joomlatools.

The following is a copy of the email Amit sent to CMS Report.

Hello,

We wanted to introduce ourselves to you & the Joomla community.  We are a new company called Joomlatools, focused on building applications for Joomla users that want professional, extendable open source extensions.  All of our extensions will be built from the ground up with lots of user feedback, tried and tested by real customers and professionally written by folks who helped create Joomla!

The November 1st issue of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article regarding Netlog.com (formerly Facebox). The article is titled, "How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers".

The article focuses on the diversity challenges that social networking sites have in Europe with Europeans speaking more than a dozen languages. Netlog appears to have stepped up to the cultural diversity challenge and is doing so at a much lower investment cost than its rivals. Netlog's secret weapons: the use of open source tools (apparently the site runs on PHP, MySQL, Ajax, etc.) as well as an army of foreign students at a nearby Belgian university.

By relying on some clever technology and a ready supply of foreign students at a nearby university, Netlog has become a veritable Tower of Babel. It counts 28 million members and has versions in 13 different languages, including French, German and Italian, as well less common tongues like Romanian and Norwegian. Polish and Russian versions are nearly finished and another dozen languages, including Catalan, Estonian and Arabic, are on the way.

That is a notable achievement, because outside of North America, many Internet start-ups are hemmed in by linguistic barriers that limit their ability to attract users and generate revenue.

I applaud Netlog's forward-thinking to build from the ground-up a multi-language content/social management system. More interesting is that while Netlog's developers understood what was at stake, the much larger U.S. social networking sites have been hampered by not thinking on more global terms.