Previous entry




June 1, 2007

A Word of Warning



If there is something I would like you to keep in mind from all that I’ve told you in the past few weeks is this: if you ever decide to create a multilingual portal, never ever, EVVER, build the various languages on the same structure!


The naïve people that we were at the beginning, we started out our article database on the same structure. The logic was that this way we can keep track of what we already have under each menu, and we can check if all the translations have come in. Very smart. EXCEPT that the three sites (the Hungarian, the English, and the German) have three very distinct audiences, with different needs, and thus are being developed differently. They are NOT translations of each other.

So what happened, basically, was that there were three strong horsies, trying to pull the same wagon in three different directions. We’ve had a couple of healthy fights, we messed up each other’s sites a few times by moving stuff around under our particular languages, and then we finally decided that it is high time we performed a surgery and separated our conjoined twins. …And that’s most of what I’ve been doing today: moving the English articles into an all-English structure. Boooring…

Please, take my word for it, and don’t you ever get yourself into this situation!


But on the bright side, I’m back online, and I’ve added a few new entries to History Matters – Part 4. Check them out under the St. Stephen heading.


...And as for our Transcontinental race, this is what you should be doing with them dots: ;-)