On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 05:03:43PM +0200, Veijo Vilva wrote:
> I have fixed the character encoding problem which has affected the
> wiki user interface for the last several months. There are still
> some translations missing, and some translations in the original
> language files for the wiki are bad or even erroneous, but the
> encoding problems are gone.
\o/
Thanks so much!
Were any code changes needed?
I didn't do any, there was just too much unknown code and too little time. I prepared the Finnish home page partially in order to be able to experiment more freely and found out a brute force method to fix things, perhaps only temporarily as the underlying cause for the problem is still lurking somewhere. The earlier db contents seemed to be OK but were incorrectly encoded for the interface. My experiments with the Finnish version helped me to find a procedure which can be used to easily fix things if the problem resurfaces in the future.
Re-importing the language.php file for a language fixes that language but destroys all the manually entered custom translations. However, if that language has a custom.php file, its contents are merged with the language.php file during the import to form a new base for the db, a new base without any translations tagged as new. At this point the wiki cache should be emptied. In case somebody manually enters any new translations, they can be exported and inserted into the custom.php file after which an import operation reinitializes the db with the new, merged contents and any new export shows only translations made after the merger. This way everything is in a known state, and the translation db (for all our languages) can be restored in a few minutes (or an hour or two if there are many custom files to be updated first.)
My procedure to update a language, say Finnish, is as follows:
1. at wiki/Edit Languages export the new translations for Finnish
2. copy-paste the translations to a copy of the custom.php file on my home computer
3. on
lojban.org: cp lang/fi/custom lang_vv/fi/custom.old (lang is linked to /var/www/lojban/tiki/lang )
4. upload to vilva@www.lojban.org:lang_vv/fi
5. on
lojban.org: sudo cp lang_vv/fi/custom.php lang/fi
6. at wiki/Edit Languages import Finnish
7. empty the wiki cache
8. check that I can access the Finnish home page
9. if the page doesn't display, there is a PHP coding error in the custom file, and the wiki is stuck:
a. sudo rm lang/fi/custom.php to release the wiki
b. sudo cp lang/fi/custom.old lang/fi/custom.php
c. edit the file at home
d. loop to 4
To restore all the languages when the custom files are up-to-date:
1. on wiki/Edit languages: import all the languages one by one, which takes about two minutes total
2. empty the cache
There is an option to export a new language.php version from the db, but in our case it is better to keep a separate custom file so that we don't lose our custom translations during a system update.