How to contribute with patchs?

[mbria]

Dear fellows,

I'm happy to say that recently our organization (UAB) get some money to translate OJS to Catalan (and/or Spanish) so we expect to contribute to the community.

Another university (UOC, Open University of Catalonia) will release very soon a brand new Catalan translation for OJS 2.2.2 so we talked with them about how to extend their wonderful work. After our conversations, we arrive to the conclusion that our contribution could start with the "Reading tools" but we noticed this part of OJS is not multilingual.

In other words, a OJS patch need to be developed to make this part language-dependent so we happily assume this work.

The point is, as you expect, that we like to keep this translation functional between OJS versions, so we like to know if there are any rules (coding style, patching, recommendations...) about how to contribute code to OJS if we aim it to be included in core.

Let me know if I'm wrong and this patch was developed by somebody or this feature is going to be included in next OJS release.

BTW, if this work is not planned or done, any indication about where to start or how to design it, are really welcome.

Thanks a lot for your help,

m.

[jmacgreg]

Hi mbria,

That's truly excellent news on the translation front!

You are indeed correct about the RT: the embedded Related Item sets must be translated manually. I would hesitate to dictate a long-term translation procedure for these, as we are actively reworking the RT code towards an OJS 2.3 release, and hope to support multiple locales in a more convenient way; in the meantime, I would suggest manually translating the related item sets from the RT web interface (available from Journal Management -> Reading Tools -> Related Item Sets), and exporting them for others to use. (As a matter of fact, it might be easiest to export each item set first; translate the XML file as needed; and then re-import to your system). We would be very happy to host any exported related item sets on our web site, alongside the 2.2.2 Catalan translation.

Please keep us posted on your work, and if you have any further questions we will be very happy to help in any way we can. Again, this is great news.

Cheers,
James

[mbria]

Hi James,

Thanks for your gentle words. It's a big pleasure for us work together with the community.

I think I was misinformed and my English is not good enough to show it clearly in my former post.

We expected to contribute in two ways:

a) Translating some Reading Tools and Help (with the translation plugin or directly from the lang files... we really don't mind)
b) Developing a patch to OJS to implement a new feature: allow multilang texts at reading tools.

From your post I understand that b) part is not required and the only problem we will find to do this job it's that we won't be able to use the translation plugin.
Now, am I right or do we really need to code a few lines to allow translated texts in the RT?

BTW, I want to make clear that the BIG translation effort was done by UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), not by us (UAB, Universitat Autònoma de Catalunya). They are going to release this work soon and after this we are going to contribute with a few more files... but they deserve the main credit.

Thanks a lot for your help,

m.

[jmacgreg]

Hi mbria,

Many thanks for the clarification!

Regarding a): The help files would have to be translated directly from the XML files found in the help/ directory -- they are large enough that using the translation plugin to translate them would be more cumbersome than just editing the XML by hand.

Regarding b): To further clarify how the Reading Tool works: The database can support multilingual related item sets, but only one set can be selected to be visible for each journal. Changing this wouldn't be very complicated, but will require some code rewriting. We are currently not actively working on the RT code ourselves at the moment as one of our partners is undertaking some substantial code and display upgrades, but if you are willing to take the work on yourself, we would be happy to help you if we can, and also very happy to accept a patch for inclusion.

Again, many thanks for this news. If you need any help at all, please let us know; and please feel free to send me an email directly, at jmacgreg at gmail dot com, when the translation is complete, and I will add it to our languages page (and ensure that it is added to CVS).

Cheers,
James