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[Epic] CentralNotice translation should move closer to MediaWiki i18n standards and the code cleaned up
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Description

CentralNotice includes a ton of fragile and custom code to manage editing banners, and to do translation things. These don't work very well, are not intuitive, are a maintenance risk, and ideally we can consolidate our code with other i18n solutions.

One alternative might be to use translatable pages, although it's pretty clunky itself.

We need to list our use cases, roughly:

  • Banner copy should be collaboratively translatable.
  • Banner copy includes parameter substitutions for constant values.
  • Banner copy includes localizable strings.

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Event Timeline

awight raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
awight updated the task description. (Show Details)
awight added subscribers: awight, Nikerabbit.
awight renamed this task from Use translatable pages for banner content to [Epic] Use translatable pages for banner content.Oct 27 2015, 5:35 PM
awight added a project: Epic.
awight set Security to None.

from Q3 brainstorming meeting:

Use translatable pages for banner content. This could wipe out ¼ of our CentralNotice backlog, plus make it way more pleasant to write and translate banners. **Need to talk to Peter and Jessica about how much this would help them to prioritize

might want to kick this until after roadmapping.

We have this as a stretch goal for Q3 - @AndyRussG and @awight with you being gone, I'm removing it as a goal for this quarter.

I'm very surprised by this proposal, I hope you'll investigate the design thoroughly before starting implementation.

I'm curious how you will automate the generation and update of a translatable page from the banner management special pages and how you will prevent manual edits from breaking the communication between the two.

It's not clear what the expected benefits are, other than the supposed decrease in amount of code and the wishful thinking that this will magically shift the burden of maintaining Translate features for CentralNotice on someone else's shoulders. Most of the blocked bugs seem quite hard to fix this way, you may want to go through them with the assistance of someone more confident with the Translate extension.

Do you CentralNotice folks still believe this is the way to go?

Hi @Nemo_bis, thanks for taking a look at the issue. This was erratic and wishful thinking on my part, for sure, and I'm open to anything we can do to reduce the technical debt of CentralNotice banner translation. I'll try to reword this bug to make fewer assumptions about how we might implement a solution.

awight renamed this task from [Epic] Use translatable pages for banner content to [Epic] CentralNotice translation should move closer to MediaWiki i18n standards and the code cleaned up.Nov 29 2016, 9:58 PM
awight updated the task description. (Show Details)

There has been no movement on this task for several years - am resolving.

Tacsipacsi subscribed.

A task not having been touched for some years is not a reason to decline it. Please explain why you think it shouldn’t be done instead of why it probably won’t be done. In the meantime, Translate started to support message bundles, which may also be a way to go, giving new hope.