Volunteer:Development
From Gospel Translations
Getting Started
Thanks for your interest in the technology that keeps Gospel Translations running. You can get involved with any of the projects below by enrolling as a volunteer. (We're also very open to your own ideas for how to make the site better or more efficient.) For ease of maintenance, right now we prefer all code to be PHP--but just ask if you think we should make an exception for a particular project.
Current projects
Active
- Multi-wiki automation - Using automated processes to launch and maintain separate wikis for each language that Gospel Translation works in. (Assigned to Nick F.)
Unassigned
- Formatting bot - Write an automation script to check for formatting errors on the wiki and correct them.
- Facebook app - This FB plugin would let people display the translation they're currently working on, how many contributions they've made in total, a "member since" date, etc. Still needs brainstorming.
- Email this page to a friend - Write a MediaWiki extension that makes it easy to send a particular article to a friend in proper formatting.
- Show/hide original - Write a script that would allow readers to show/hide the original (English) text next to translated text on foreign-language pages. This would allow side-by-side review in an easy manner.
Software
Gospel Translations relies on a few basic pieces of software to run smoothly.
MediaWiki is our wiki engine, and is the same software used by Wikipedia. It was chosen for it's proven scalability, excellent support for multiple languages, and it's easy extensibility. The fact that it has such excellent community support was also a big factor when we chose it. MediaWiki runs on PHP and MySQL.
DabbleDB is our online database provider, helping us keep information about all of our publishers, articles, volunteers, and translations organized in one central place. Better still, it has good API support, so we've been able to tie the data their directly into wiki articles--when you visit a page and see the blue box listing Author, Translator, and so forth (see example), you are seeing MediaWiki and DabbleDB work together.
