Ever since the localization framework was first introduced in DotNetNuke 3.0, it has always been our intention to go back and complete the localization story for DotNetNuke. When localization was first introduced in DotNetNuke, we only tackled the localization of static strings. This support for the localization of static strings was sufficient to address the needs of many international users, however it was not adequate for addressing multi-lingual sites.
We realized from the beginning that content localization was a tough issue to address, and one which could be solved in numerous ways. Every time we looked at tackling content localization, the effort always seemed to be a bigger than we had the resources to be able to tackle. We wanted to make sure that whatever solution we put in place would meet the needs for a large portion of our community.
After many meetings with members of our Internationalization team, international community members and customers, and after many months of development, we are finally ready to release a DotNetNuke version which supports content localization. I will leave it to others on our development team to go into the details of the implementation as we approach the final release of 5.5. You can see an earlier version of code in the two videos that Scott previously posted.
Today, I am pleased to announce that an Alpha version of DotNetNuke 5.5 is available for download. We are still in the middle of addressing some outstanding bugs from previous releases along with any bugs we are finding in the new 5.5 specific code. We anticipate being able to release a beta version next week, but need your help in identifying any major outstanding issues with the current alpha release.
Because this is an Alpha release, we will not be supporting a seamless upgrade to the final 5.5 release. This code should not be deployed in a production environment since we haven’t completed performance testing and tuning and we know that significant bugs still exist in this version of the code.
You can download the code from the Beta Release page on DotNetNuke.com. Please post any questions or comments on the release to the Open Core Testing forum.