CiviCRM in Japanese

[japancoder]

Hi All!

I am new around here but not new to CiviCRM at all. I just wrapped up a complete mega hack of CiviCRM to have it work properly in Japanese for an internal Japanese Government Agency and pulled the backend to the front under a Joomla install. Joomla was also hacked away as well due to the lack of usable security hooks that CiviCRM could utilize. Drupal was not an option as per some opinions from the powers that be.

In any case, I have asked for permission for screen shots of the system to be posted, it currently manages about 4.5 million individual records with about 20,000 staff reaching in from various wards in Japan it is being run under a 12 month exploratory trial with a legacy system being run concurrently.

As a matter of curiosity we did not utilize the localization model as it would not have resulted in a properly functional environment for Japanese users. So we rewrote the tpls in templates and wrote a layer to switch template languages based on user parameters. We also need to hack the First Name Last Name relationships because we use three six distinct written styles in Japanese to represent names thus we capture 3 fields for First Name and 3 Fields for Last Name.

Something like this for you Anime fans:
First Name in Kanji: 明
First Name Kana: アキラ
First Name in Romaji: Akira

Kudos to the CiviCRM team for a great platform. I will post up the screenshots as soon as I have written approval.

[Donald Lobo]

Japancoder:

this is so so so amazing it blows my mind congratulations on building such a cool big system on top of CiviCRM am pleasantly surprised, astonished and speechless (all at the same time)

Would be great to see some screen shots and a more detailed site description. Please consider posting it under:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Implementation+Case+Studies
http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,4.0.html

Would be great to get more detailed feedback and critique and how we can improve the platform to minimize hacks for japanese and other asian languages. We would very much like to make the changes in CiviCRM core, if you are willing to educate us on some of the current problems and your workarounds / hacks. Would be also good to address the "multiple" name issue since some other languages also have this problem

Looking forward to learning more about the work u have done ...

lobo

[japancoder]

lobo,

I can take you through it live. I was going to reach out to you because of another project we are involved in that is pretty large and CiviCRM can take center stage in. I've been pushing the idea. It involved some very large Japanese corporations and their foundations and some discussions we have been having regarding CiviCRM. Perhapes we can speak via voice or IM when you have an opportunity.

[Donald Lobo]

I've sent u my skype and IM id's via a PM (personal message). Looking forward to chatting with you

lobo

[hallman]

Would be great to see some screen shots and a more detailed site description. Please consider posting it under:

http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Implementation+Case+Studies

I moved the Case Studies page to
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Case+Studies