[Catalyst] www.engoi.com nearly migrated to catalyst

[Daniel McBrearty]

Hi,

The port of www.engoi.com (currently a collection of cgi's under
apache/mod_perl) to cat is nearly there.

You can take a look at http://www.sodabean.net

Note:

1. some pages are very slow. But they will be served as static pages
in production, so no problem for now. (They are served dynamically
here so that translators can see what is going on as they make edits.)

2. some CSS problems in IE to fix, as usual ...

It doesn't look much different to the existing site, but under the
hood it's a whole new app.

The biggest thing we now have that was much missing is a way of
managing the workflow of translations from dev to production via the
translation server. This was a huge issue in the old site that made
continuous development and upgrade of the site almost impossible. The
flexibility of cat's MVC architecture has made this possible; multiple
models to get data from the database, have a specialist api over the
db, and to add new English text to the site in development without
having the problem of keeping databases in sync. By grepping for text
tags in templates feeding that back into the db, translators can now
see the text tags for the site grouped by the pages in which they
appear.

The "chained" feature has been fantastic both for dividing the
namespace by language (both the native language AND the language being
learned), and also for providing access control to admin and
translator functions by role.

All of this has been so that we have a decent platform to add new
features to the site in future (there's a lot of new stuff to add).
It's been so busy doing this in my "spare time" that I have not
thought much about making any of this available back to the community.
I hope that that will change in future, and that one day engoi will
have some nicely matured features to put back into cat. (First we have
to get this thing off teh ground though ;-) )

lots of thanks to this list for immeasurable help in getting this job
(nearly) done, and helping me along that never-ending learning curve.

Daniel







-- 
Daniel McBrearty
email : danielmcbrearty at gmail.com
www.engoi.com : the multi - language vocab trainer
BTW : 0873928131