Third day of Localisation Sprint/Hackathon

Today's localisation sprint started with a presentation from Piotr on how multilingual installations works in CiviCRM. Multilingual is when you want to have not only a localised interface, but many co-existing languages. So for example the labels of custom fields may need to be in English or Spanish if the organisation has a bilingual website. In general, most labels can be translated using multilingual, but not the data itself. The main except to this is the contact name, so that it can be entered in multiple alphabets. Multilingual was labeled as an experimental feature until CiviCRM 3.1, but this warning might be removed in 3.2. A few large installs have reported using it successfully. On the coding side,

• Lobo and Goran have pretty much wrapped up the multi-currency support. For now this allows to enter contributions offline (in the backend) in multiple currencies. Changes in the frontend will probably appear in 3.3.
• Lobo and Goran have also worked on "per contact language preference", meaning that contacts can now specify their preferred language. Eventually, this will allow interesting features, such as the possibility to send a common mailing to contacts in their preferred language.
• Deepak and Jimmy worked on issues specific to traditionnal Chinese. Jimmy sent a patch to the maintainer of the jQuery plugin "Tokenizing Autocomplete Text Entry"
• Yashodha has solved a few bugs related to the new configuration options for money formats (thousands and decimal separators)
• Piotr worked on the splitting of translation files per component so that translators can more easily target what they want to translate.
• Erik has worked on building a list of most important terms to have in a glossary for translators.
• Mathieu P has worked on a "string overrides" equivalent for CiviCRM, allowing admins to easily change specific CiviCRM strings using the interface.
• Mathieu L and Jimmy worked on a draft document of "how to build a localisation community"

In the afternoon, Erik, Mathieu P and Mathieu L headed to the documentation sprint to give a hand on various issues, including a section related to the localisation of CiviCRM.