CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I agree with you that multi-lingual features are not as good as one would hope, but somehow doubt that insulting the developers of "xenophobia and ignorance" is going to improve the situation.

I find your insult quite ironic, as the vast majority of the core developers are not americans and are not living in the US.

Good luck, looking forward to your contributions to improve drupal/civi.

X+

Of course. I just needed to rant, that's all. I feel better now. And worked out a block snippet that fixed the language issues.

Multilingual features are used by a minority of CiviCRM installations and so they are definitely not at the top of the list of critical issues.

This must be the most stupid thing I've heard. In a world that is getting more and more international, the need for easy, down-to-earth multilingual support is a must for any serious project. It should, in fact, be the very first cornerstone in the foundation.

Why does civicrm has a minority of multilingual installations? Because they are inhumanly difficult to get to work and we get to a catch 22 situation where you won't ever make this easy and people won't ever use it because it's hard. By all means, I would prefer doing this in civicrm, but the only way it will work now is with three separate installs.

And stop playing the "why don't you help instead" card. It is absolutely impossible to implement a feature this big into any software versioning over 3.0 without having to rewrite it from scratch - nobody will do it, wherever they would want it or not.

I'm reaching that conclusion on the fact that out of 60 commercial website projects hosted by my umbrella corporation, 55 either are multilingual from the get-go or have huge problems implementing a second language. The internet valley I work in in general doesn't have many monolingual sites, despite being in a typical European proud-not-to-know-English kind of country. I am completely uninterested in the (true) fact that most of the sites on the web are monolingual. That ratio changes very fast as soon as there is any commercial interest behind it.

The easiest current way I handle multilingual settings in civirm is to bluntly install three version with three languages. Or two for that matter.

Everything is possible to change, and plenty of very successful softwares didn't start multi-lingual but had this feature added later.

No. Try adding intuitive things like file rights to a fully developed system like let's say Windows XP. If it was so easy, those well-paid engineers would probably have been able to stich something together sometime during the last decade.

This being said, Someone ranting is probably not enough to have made the change happen. Money or code is on the other hand much more likely to solve the problem. I'd like to be proven wrong, but your comment doesn't strike me as someone that is going to provide either.

Let us know if you publish an open source and truly multi-lingual CRM that matches civicrm features, I would be happy to use it for some of my sites.

Careful you don't bite your tongue there. 

The reality is that civicrm is way oversized to and complex to be changed at any time now. I do not agree on the way the tables are constructed, on the way forms are made, on the choice of smarty in general, on the completely unintuitive administration and absolute lack of customization of certain important things, but yet I use it. Why? Because it's good and it's free and because I can actually squeeze one or another hack of my own in it to make it bend to my will. Because I can manage to do a lot of work with a generally well working and well tested platform. However, and it is a sad remark, good language support has never been at the forefront of the planning of this project and is too late to date to be well implemented. Take this lesson with you to whenever it is time to rewrite civicrm into another shape or form - maybe you might be the leader of that project and I would be very sad if such an important thing yet again was omitted.

just curious if the 60 commercial website projects you mention below are all using civicrm and if so, which ones and your analysis of them. Also for how long have you been deploying and using civicrm for the set of sites that have been using civicrm.

None of the commercial websites in my umbrella corporation uses civirm - similar development is made in-house or using other frameworks for a number of different reasons, the multilanguage support not necessarily being the main one. The example was created to illustrate the huge importance and value given to multilingual software in the commercial world, as opposed to the opinions of xavier.

Unforunately, many of the core developers are mono-lingual (from a programming perspective). Your posts are quite general so to help us out, can you be a lot more specific with the top 10 things that are broken in the current system. If you have the time and energy, suggestions on how to potentially improve on any of them would also be great

I will try to summarize my opinions in a later post as I'm currently only exploring the administrative powers of v4.0.1. In general, it is far superior over the predecessor, including language support, so I'm not complaining per se, even if there are still many things that I never really liked and other things I'm still lacking (or never have found).

It is also a pain in the ass to debug and modify, so even as a veteran programmer I have to admit defeat and make stupid hacks when I want things to do what I want.