dcsjapan
commented
8 years ago ... And I'll kick off the discussion with:
Installer Localization?
The fact that the default Flarum installation won't include any language resources other than English may be a bit inconvenient for non-English speaking admins trying to set up Flarum for the first time. At the very least, they'll have to deal with the English interface long enough to install another language pack. That's not a huge task, but we can probably make the process a bit more comfortable for everyone.
Specifically, we can do two things to make Flarum more accessible across language barriers:
1. Localize the installer.
We could use a service like Transifex to solicit translations for language resources used by the installer, and include translations for as many languages as possible in the installer package. The first page of the installation wizard would consist of a language selector; all information displayed on subsequent pages would appear in the selected language. (A fallback for incomplete translations might also be good.)
Although generally I don't favor this approach, the installer merits an exception because:
- The quality of translations isn't hugely important, since they're used once and never seen again.
- The number of strings needed by the installer should be relatively small.
- Once the installer is complete, the translations probably won't need to be updated all that often.
These things make this approach worth considering, whereas it tends to become inflexible and unwieldy when applied to a larger application that evolves over time.
2. Install a language pack, too.
The first step gets us halfway there: admins will be able to install Flarum comfortably using the language of their choice. But once it's installed, they'll still have to deal with English. We can help them past that hurdle by having the installer add a language pack of their choice to the default installation.
At some point, the installer could display a "customize your installation" screen. As I suggested at the staff meeting the other day, such a screen could offer admins the chance to skip the installation of any bundled extensions that they know they won't be using. But even if we don't want to do that, it would be a good idea to allow admins to add a language pack during installation. The "customize your installation" screen would do two things:
- Poll the Marketplace for a list of all available language packs for the Flarum version being installed.
- Display that list, with a pack matching the locale chosen on the first page as the preselected option.
In addition to the names of the available language packs, this list would need to include links to the Marketplace descriptions for each language pack, so that the admin will be able to make an informed decision in cases where there's more than one language pack per locale.
The installer would then download, install, and enable the language pack selected by the user, and set it as the default language for the site. (If we like, we could also add a "Disable the English language pack" checkbox to the "customize" page, so that the language selector will not appear in the site header once installation is complete.)
These two steps should make it easy for admins everywhere to get started with Flarum.
franzliedke
I'm adding this issue as a place to discuss ideas related to the creation of an installation wizard.
The latest proof-of-concept for an installer can be found here: https://github.com/flarum/flarum/pull/31