SugarCRM Guides Translation Hub

[ntavares]

Greetings to all SugarCRM community,

At DRI, we are trying to overcome the lack of documentation in languages
other than English. I've searched the forums for this kind of
initiative, and it seems they never passed the "feature request" status.

That's why we have set up an open wiki-based translation platform, to
which anyone can collaborate. I'm inviting all SugarCRM community to try
it and comment (see below), propose working paths, and to SugarCRM
itself to embrace this project in a way that most of the documentation
materials can be collaboratively developed.

The considered key points to achieve were:
* Provide materials online
* Reuse the materials to generate other formats (like PDF)
* Allow community based participation
* Support for multiple "page groups", which relate to each combination
of SugarCRM version and Guide type.

The key arguments to the decision of this platform were:
* Wiki is collaborative
* Wiki can be easily reviewed
* Users can easily be notified of updated materials
* Mediawiki is a widely known platform.

The extras we got were:
* An easy platform to maintain virtually any language to which users
wish to collaborate.

Having said that, the actual platform is more like a proof-of-concept.
It works pretty much like Wikipedia does (it is also mediawiki), besides
also being the platform used to the SugarCRM wiki, which (I hope) may
sound like a great invitation to users willing to write documentation.

What would be great to have in the future would be:
* Allow users to work directly in a XML format (instead of wiki's). I'm
not sure how are the guides currently being written, but I suspect it's
DocBook. It doesn't seem to be hard to setup a DocBook "rendered" which
will: 1) render the pages online as HTML and 2) generate the full
PDF/PS/etc as the example I'm describing next. For that, SugarCRM would
need only to put available the DocBook sources, and someone would import
them into the platform. If corrections are made, a simple bot would
notify all "language subprojects" of them, in the respective pages, so
the community involved could fix it ASAP.

Please note that this platform is still a work in progress.

So, for a demonstration (forgive me the fact the english instructions
are not yet writen, only in portuguese[1]):

* Suppose we want to start the "SugarCRM Enterprise 5.0 User Guide" for
portuguese language (in portuguese: Manual do Utilizador de SugarCRM
Enterprise 5.0). A simple admininstration task will open the "slot" for
you in minutes. This slot will be "MU-SE-5.0". All page titles starting
with this tag will refer to this guide.

* Try writing about "About this Guide" (Sobre este Manual) in
http://pt.lang.sugarcrm.com.pt/index...re_este_Manual

* If you wish, you can link to other languages as well. These links
would be in the upper right corner (see "Outras línguas", which will
link to http://en.lang.sugarcrm.com.pt/SE-UG...out_this_Guide, or
[[en:SE-UG-5.0:About this Guide]], if you prefer); also notice that
linking has been done two-way: [[en:SE-UG-5.0:About this Guide]] has a
link to [[pt:MU-SE-5.0:Sobre este Manual]].

* After writing some sentences, be sure to categorize that page into
Category:MU-SE-5.0 :
http://pt.lang.sugarcrm.com.pt/index...oria:MU-SE-5.0
Also notice that looking at the category is an analogy to looking at the
whole sheets of the user guide.

* As you will notice, that category page has a message (next to a book)
that says "click here to generate a PDF" (in portuguese: "descarregar
como um livro em PDF"). Click on it, and evaluate the result.


We are looking forward for you collaboration.

[1] http://lang.sugarcrm.com.pt/index.ph...o_come%C3%A7ar

[Marc1]

Hi Nuno, hi everybody.
Congratulations for your smart initiative.

I wish to translate Sugar CE (community edition) user guide into italian language. Is your framework intended for Sugar commercial edition only?

Thanks