graphox

Hi,

I’m currently building a bilingual wordpress blog (designed so it could be multilingual). I’ve nearly finished the wordpress customisation that’s needed to translate everything. It’s not a huge amount of work, but it is very fiddley. There is no simple plugin that could allow you to translate your entire blog. As well as installing plugins, you also have to change the core code.

The link above from moshu is quite old now, and there have been some developments. In particular, the plugin called polyglot has been developed further, and it now does nearly all of the work that is necessary. There are a few others in development, including one called Gengo, which looks very promising, but none of the plugins can fully translate your blog, because there are limitations in wordpress itself. Also, last time i checked last november/december, many of the available wordpress themes needed a bit of work to make them fully internationalised. Nonetheless, polyglot does work very nicely, and one particularly good feature is that it detects the Accept-Language header in the HTTP request. This means that if a visitor’s browser is set to prefer a particular language, and there is a translation available, then the blog will automatically respond by providing the page in that language. If you’re using a good browser you can edit this setting, which can be set to a list of languages in decreasing preference. Oh, and once a language has been selected it does use cookies to keep track.

Asssssssa! I’ve cracked it. It’s taken me several frustrating hours.

I was helped by this poor guy who apparently had an even harder time: Turning MySQL data in latin1 to utf8

My solution was this:

First use mysqldump to export the database content in <b>latin1</b> encoding. Yes, latin1! i.e.:

mysqldump --default-character-set=latin1 ... > dump.sql

Then use iconv to convert the file, but force it to read the file as if it were actually EUC-KR.

iconv -f EUC-KR -t UTF-8 dump.sql > utf8_dump.sql

(bear in mind that on your system the precise encoding names may differ to the ones above, run ‘iconv -l‘ to get a listing)

iconv may also produce some errors if your dump contains characters that are not valid EUC-KR. For me this only happened on tables that were being used for caching (by one of my plugins), so I simply deleted the table from the SQL file and it converted perfectly.

Next I opened the mysql client from my unix shell and tried to ‘source’ the sql file (By this point I’d managed to configure Putty properly, so that korean text and utf8 were working). I eventually realised that it was the mysql unix client that was causing the problems. So I imported the dump file using phpMyAdmin and hey-presto, the Korean syllables were appearing correctly in phpMyAdmin.

However, in my blog things looked worse than ever. I just had a mass of question marks.

This was easy to resolve though, the solution has already been posted elsewhere. You must edit the file wp-includes/wp-db.php to add an extra mysql query after the database connection. In the current version, add this at line 43:

mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8");

lhk, Thanks for highlighting the current legal situation.

… You will be anyway the moment someone rips and uses material from you which you yourself created, wish to sell and find strewn all over the internet without even correctly attributing it and under these circumstances suffering quite some financial and other loss.

Nearly all of the work I have done belongs to private companies. Outside the companies, none of the work was ever attributed to me, because it belonged to my employer and it was their product. I never had any say over how it was marketed, licensed and distributed – I have strong suspicions that they spent more on these marketing and legal costs than they did on us, the actual developers/artists. Also, due to the prohibitively high price of the software we created, many people where prevented from using it. Some of the software was capable of aiding medical diagnosis and could have saved lives.

I would really be more than happy for my work to be freely distributed across the web, but I can’t because I was coerced into signing away copyright. I would be even happier if I could share my code with other people, and we could all benefit from each others’ experience.

Unfortunately it’s nigh-on impossible to earn a living wage developing free and open source software. Perhaps the situation would be different if the software “industry” wasn’t propped up by these copyright laws that enable them to deprive people of their freedoms.

… do you think it would be of no effect at all, if the copyright of the Coke bottle was widely used by anyone from Pepsi to the streetvendor?

I’m not especially bothered by the shape and style of coke bottles, but perhaps it would be good to see the end of those wretched brainwashing commercials.

I think the abolition of copyright (or at least a better compromise than the situation we have at present) would transform society for the better. We would need to find new ways to fund creative works, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

doodlebee, you have suddenly raised the issue of theft. But aren’t stealing and copying entirely different things?

Say, for example, you stole a piece of artwork from a gallery and kept it for yourself. In that situation, you are clearly depriving other people of that artwork. Or, alternatively, if you stole someones food, or their clothes, then you may be depriving them of things they need to survive. These things are all scarce resources.

However, if you are making a copy of some digital information, then the original creator is never deprived of their own work. In fact nobody is deprived, nothing has been taken away; the information is an infinitely abundant resource.

In my mind, it is actually unethical to provide people with information while prohibiting them from sharing it. By doing so you are using copyright law to unnecessarily deprive people of resources, and remove peoples’ freedoms.

The problem with “sharing” images/music/writing you see on the internet is that you never know who the original artist is, and whether or not they actually gave permission for the “sharing”. *That* is what’s unethical. …

Why are we ethically obliged to obtain permission before we can copy (or adapt, and improve) pieces of information?

(You also suggest that we would be obtaining this permission from the original artist, but I suspect this is rarely the case. We would probably be dealing with the copyright-holder, who may not even be an individual.)

Isn’t it unethical for these copyright holders, empowered by the law, to take away the natural freedoms to share and adapt information from everybody else?

ronam, it’s almost certainly illegal to play that music!

Try looking for some music under a creative commons license though.

I strongly disagree with doodlebee though, who describes it as “highly unethical to copy *any* form of artwork”.

Doodlebee is absolutely right that you can be prosecuted, but the fact that it’s illegal doesn’t mean that it’s unethical (In Saudi Arabia, somebody told me, it’s illegal for women to drive!).

Perhaps it is unethical to plagiarise other peoples work, but that is not the same thing as sharing digital copies… Or even just playing some background music … What the hell is unethical about that?

When it comes to the ethics of the situation, is it unethical to copy photos? Or is it more unethical to prohibit other people from sharing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing

I’m having the same problem. The error message is “The uploaded file could not be moved to .” and then the error page stops dead without closing any of the html tags properly.

I’ve tried creating a full set of directories named wp-content/uploads/YYYY/MM with permissions set to 777, but I still get the same error.

Is this a recognised bug?

I’m trying to find a blog client to write posts in Korean. I can write Korean with Semagic, but I can’t get it to connect to my blog.

I am using the same settings that I tried with w.Bloggar.

I’ve discovered that if I change the character encoding for the entire site to EUC-KR then the Korean posts do work fine!

But isn’t it possible to encode all the Korean syllables in UTF-8?

I tried using the Basic Bilingual plugin with the language “ko”, but that didn’t solve the problem.

Thanks for the pointer.

I’ve installed the ‘Category Levels’ plugin and it seems to do the job pretty well. I couldn’t find an intro on the web, so I’ll explain a bit for the benefit of people who need to do the same thing as me:

The ‘Category Levels’ plugin can deny persmission to, or completely hide, the categories and posts from all users who are below certain user-levels.

So, you can configure it to either make the posts disappear altogether (this is my personal preference), or display an access-denied message to underprivileged visitors.

If you opt to hide the posts (and this is the default funtionality), the protected posts and categories will only appear when the user is logged in with a sufficiently high user-level. For other visitors there is no clue that these protected posts exist. Even if you access the hidden posts directly (via a saved URL) then WordPress will act as if they dont exist.

The plugin is based on the 10 user privilege levels that are already built into WordPress.

The only major improvement I would like to see is a permission system based on user groups rather than the more restrictive permission levels.