We are now the official maintainers of the Faroese WordPress translation. Not that we have given up on Drupal, but WordPress is a really nice fast fix, if you want to set up a personal blog or web page like this one. There are a lot more readily available themes too, which is good if you don’t know how to theme yourself. You can find the necessary WordPress 2.3 fo.mo language file here on the ‘WordPress in Your Language‘ page at wordpress.org.
We are now the official maintainers of the Faroese Drupal translation. Drupal is in our personal view the most promising open source CMS system out there, above other great systems like Joomla and WordPress, because it offers almost endless possibilities and flexibility without having to sacrifice user-friendliness.
This is said after having tested all three sites for more than half a year. Joomla is strong and flexible but seems to scare off our co-writers. With the bottom line being that they post nothing on our site. WordPress is more simple, but you have to be able to hack php and templates a lot, in order to integrate for instance a forum.
Drupal has all features that we find interesting with the other two, plus more, and especially the possibility of hiding the complexity from your co-writers. You can grant your users specific permissions to for instance being able to write but not edit posts. With the bottom line being that we have the same users posting stuff on a Drupal site, right after launch, that have been just surfing a similar Joomla site for more than a year.
Tux Paint is a free drawing program for children ages 3 to 12, that combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and a helpful cartoon mascot. Kids are presented with a blank canvas and a variety of drawing tools to help them be creative. Very good, and now even in Faroese 🙂
Well that should be obvious, shouldn’t it ?
Actually, it was pretty hard work to translate the 1239 strings in a default WordPress installation from English to Faroese, just to discover that that covered more or less just the back end part of the system. There were another 277 strings in this K2 theme, used here, and then we had problems enabling the translations. And THEN there was the content itself, our categories and menus and titles and text.
But it was of course all good fun, and most importantly in the past by now.
This was one of our first translation projects, which started in spring 2005 and resulted in an official Faroese version in spring 2006. WinGrodan is a Swedish swim meet management system, that is widely used in most Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland). It has an English version too, if any English speaking club should be interested.
The Faroese Swimming Association purchased licenses for itself and all Faroese swimming clubs early in 2005, and soon realized that it would be nice to have it translated into Faroese. The people behind WinGrodan didn’t mind, if only the Faroese could do the translation themselves.And since Rókur here was the most computer technical savvy person in the room at the moment of discussion, he got the honours.
The program itself was quite easy to translate, as all the words were in one big XML-file. We had some trouble with translating the shortcut buttons though, mnemonic keys and stuff, and the help files were soon skipped entirely, for this first version. But now it speaks Faroese, and we’re very proud.
Hello World! At last this site is up and running. WordPress is quite easy to install and use, as long as you stick to the standard setup. But when trying to mod it, the compatibility between core versions and templates and plug-ins is HELL, to say the least. Oh well, after a lot of forum reading and poking around, it seems that the site is quite nice looking AND without visible bugs. So stop fiddling with it. STOP FIDDLING. Oh well.
