DotNetNuke en français? en español? in your language?

DotNetNuke in French or Spanish?  How about German, or Farsi or Simplified Chinese?  Historically DotNetNuke has been installable only in English.  But when we teamed up with Microsoft to install DotNetNuke through the Web Application Gallery, we knew it would create opportunity to better serve and support our international community.  We’re currently working with a few key volunteers to establish ongoing publication of a few localized versions of DotNetNuke.  If you’re interested and would like to help, please email community@dotnetnuke.com!

DotNetNuke has a long history of supporting localization in the platform. And thanks to a global audience, a dedicated Internationalization team and a few hardworking enthusiasts, various DotNetNuke “language packs” are available in over 60 different languages. That’s great! But with increasing global interest in DotNetNuke and the growing need to support multilingual websites, we can do a little more and you’re invited to help!

(figure 1)   (figure 2)   (figure 3)

Traditionally, the installation experience for DotNetNuke has been translated (see figure 1), but DotNetNuke itself was installed in English only; additional language packs have to be imported to translate the application to another language.  Many of these language packs are contributed and freely available for download at www.dotnetnuke.com.  Others are available from the websites of their respective producers such as the French DotNetNuke User Group, the German DotNetNuke User Group or others. Microsoft's Web Application Gallery listing for DotNetNuke provides the added benefit of translating the description into multiple display languages (see figure 2) but with our standard package, the installation is still performed in the traditional English. Enter the “Deploy Package”. A “Deploy Package” is a specially structured zip file which contains the standard installations files, a core language pack and localized install packages for a couple of key extensions like the HTML module and telerik editor and a couple of other simple files.  The Web Application Gallery enables us to expose these customized deploy packages to users searching for applications available in their language (see figure 3).  Unfortunately the Web Application Gallery only supports a fixed list of languages, but that list is growing. And the good news is that although it might not be discoverable in the Web Application Gallery, we can still add ANY customized language to our listing and expose a link directly to it from www.dotnetnuke.com.

So today we have a number of valued community members creating and sharing DotNetNuke core language packs.  We also have translation management tools being created by folks like Peter Donker (Localization Editor project) and Benoit Sarton (a desktop translation app in progress).  With a little bit of education and coordination, translated deploy packages should be achievable!

In order to be really meaningful, deploy packages need to be available for the “current version” of DotNetNuke.  We did a test run of this process under version 5.6.2 by providing a Simplified Chinese version with the assistance of the team at http://www.51aspx.com.  The team provided a little more than needed (adding some additional module translations) but a Deploy package for Simplified Chinese versus English (to see how they are constructed) can be found on the 5.6.2 downloads at Codeplex.  Since our Web Application Gallery downloads always point to the latest version, it is essential that localized deploy packages be created as close to the English release dates as possible.  Working with trusted partners we should be able to provide stable releases sufficiently in advance.

Our real challenge will be supporting the logistics required to ensure consistent publishing of the localized deploy packages in a timely manner.  And for this, we’re looking for multilingual volunteers who love DotNetNuke as much as we do!  If you’re fluent in a language other than English and willing to get involved… please let us know at community@dotnetnuke.com, we’d love to hear from you!

You can expect to hear a lot more about localized installation of DotNetNuke in the weeks to come.