Kubla is dead! Long live Kubla!

The last time Kubla came up we were still evaluating options and the code was an old version of CakePHP all flushed out with scaffolding. Most of the time between then and now has been spent on other projects (I’m looking at you AMO) but we’ve made enough progress to justify another update.

Out of the CMS‘s evaluated, we thought two showed great promise for our set of requirements.

The first option that I got excited about was Wyona’s Yulup. This is actually an add-on for Firefox that can talk directly to SVN (via WebDAV). It is simple, supports WYSIWYG editing, has xhtml validation, supports WebDAV authentication, and much more, all out of the box. I like that it leverages existing systems in an effective way, and is fairly unique (compared to traditional CMS’s). It has a lot of promise for someone looking for a simple solution to editing static pages.

That said, we would have to make significant changes to the add-on, or, more likely, write quite a bit of code separately to handle requirements like indicating a relationship between a page in English and other languages (to tell which English pages had been translated and which hadn’t).

The second option is the well known Drupal. There are lists expounding on Drupal’s good qualities already, so I’ll skip that, but suffice it to say, we’re most interested in the modularity that comes with Drupal. We’re going to need to write some code to handle language detection and localization, and Drupal’s hooks should make this easier, not to mention the pile of pre-built modules.

After collaborating on our options, we’ve decided to pursue the Drupal option. I’ll be replacing the languishing code in SVN with a copy of Drupal shortly, and continuing development there.

Thanks for everyone’s input.

5 responses

  1. kourge wrote on :

    The upcoming Drupal 6 will have even more internationalization flexibility. Check out the nightlies.

  2. Wil Clouser wrote on :

    Hey kourge,

    I’ve been looking at Drupal 6, and I applaud that they’re taking localization seriously in it. I was disappointed to read it the next revision of it was delayed another month, although I can understand and certainly relate to that.

    We’ll be starting work with Drupal 5.1 and modules. I’ve looked at the i18n and Localization modules, and neither will work out of the box. My current (rough) plan is to build off the Localization module. (The first hiccup is permissions – it has no concept of user/group permissions).

  3. greggles wrote on :

    I would encourage you to at least try to contact the folks that are working on i18n for Drupal6 and ask for tips on how to build the site in Drupal5 in a way that will ease upgrading into Drupal6. They’ve been the ones writing or reviewing the modules for Drupal5 and will likely have some ideas. Obviously the fact that it’s for such a large project that shares many goals with the Drupal project will help get their attention 😉

    The code-freeze is a tough issue. It’s nice to stick to advertised deadlines, but really Drupal typically has at least as long of a bugfix period post-code-freeze as it does feature addition pre-code-freeze period so Drupal6 will likely take until q3 or q4 of 2007 to be released. Delaying that by a month isn’t terribly significant and there’s so much work that is close to being ready for inclusion but isn’t _quite_ there. Hopefully that makes some sense.

  4. Wil Clouser wrote on :

    Hey greggles,

    I’ve talked to the author of the localization module ( http://drupal.org/project/localizer ), and I’m planning on building off of that. (As opposed to the i18n module). Talking to the developers about drupal 6 is a good idea though, or at the least looking at the code and how they’re doing it.

    I hit up a drupal meeting last night ( http://micropipes.com/blog/2007/06/14/june-pdx-drupal-meetup/ ), but didn’t find anyone else doing a multilingual site. Good times though. 🙂

  5. Frédéric Wenzel wrote on :

    I can’t believe you put it under /projects 😉