When the Liberal Democrats initially came up with the specification for what would turn out to be their Fleet website system, simple bilinguality for the Welsh State and Welsh Local Party sites was a key requirement.
The need helped guide us towards Typo3 as a platform. It was designed for the job, which in this case was to make it simple to build in both English and Welsh languages and switch between them.
We’ve built Fleet for our Welsh sites to offer that option. We’ve worked with a translator and the Welsh Party so that the “scaffolding” of sites automatically translates between pages. However, we’ve also made it easy for site editors to create the rest in both languages – from menu items to full pages and news articles.
Context is also key, and its not just the text that can vary between versions. It maybe that there is a better picture to illustrate the Welsh language version of an article than the one used on the English version. You can change that too. And the descriptive text like alt tags, descriptions and even url click-throughs can also be set by language: brilliant!
We’re regularly asked why we don’t use automatic translation of content blocks from English to Welsh. Answer: it still sounds terrible. An automatic translation will generally give the “flavour” but also be absolutely obvious to a native Welsh speaker. Want a Welsh translation? You need a Welsh speaker!
Three members of the Prater Raines developer team took an epic journey (OK, maybe not epic, but we did have to catch 7 different trains) to Karlsruhe in the Black Forest to bask in the glorious sunshine* at the annual TYPO3 Developer Days conference.
* And a teeny bit of rain, thunder and lightning to keep us on our toes.
We learned about CSS, deployment, testing, time management and upcoming improvements to the platform and we met other TYPO3 developers from around the world.
Automated testing is a great thing and something we’re always looking at doing much, much more of. But sometimes it’s just unavoidable that errors in third party systems slip through and make it onto the production website. That’s especially the case for minor bugs that generate warning notices but have no noticeable impact on the site functionality. We can pick up on and deal with these snags before they become bigger problems thanks to our world class server monitoring, and open source means we can fix the problem upstream much more quickly.
Every time I’ve gone away to a conference recently, and PHP UK 2024 was no exception to the rule, I’ve come home jealous of all the pretty Powerline-style prompts the presenters seem to have on their Macs. It’s always on their Macs.
So I decided this was the time to do something about it and bring the development team the joy of version control integration and pretty status icons in their shell prompts and text editor statuslines.
We use the Fish shell not the more usual Bash so I installed and configured Oh My Fish with the bobthefish theme, and Powerline for the Vim integration. Although after a brief “holy war” discussion on text editors it appears I might be the only one who uses Vim. Here’s how I did it:
I’m delighted that there’s been a twenty year trend in the United Kingdom for free and open access to more and more government data. Information about the public that has been largely collected at taxpayer expense should be made as widely available as possible, in open, machine- and human-readable formats.
So I’m especially proud that it’s a Liberal Democrat peer who is making the latest push for regular publishing of the Postcode Address File, the Royal Mail dataset of every address in the country.
Salesforce has a handy tool to insert, update, and delete bulk data from CSV, XML, or JSON files. Salesforce says the tool only works on Windows and MacOS.
This can only be for lack of a QA team because not only is the tool written in platform-independent Java, but the download includes all the code you need to run it on Linux including a secret install script.
Here’s how to get it working in a few easy steps.
As Germany moves away from closed source software to a strategy using TYPO3 for all government websites, I joined Jana Höffner and Nikolai Jaklitsch at this year’s T3CON in Düsseldorf to discuss software in government and how Open Source is the only way to guarantee digital sovereignity, foster local talent and create a digital economy.
I missed spring conference even though it was in my favourite city, York. But I was a fair bit preoccupied waiting for child #2 to be born. The autumn event was back in Glasgow, so I didn’t have to wait too long for my next my cool northern city hit.
Major developments on our Lib Dem platform included statistics on email send and open rates, better email templating, and automated campaign groups based on area or membership status. Gary did a lot of design work on the sites, with a particular emphasis on making them more mobile-friendly and producing new skins which closely mirrored the rebranded federal party site, and enough other designs to triple the number of choices available to customers.
Oh, we had to move one of the sites behind a content delivery network after they put up a rather controversial petition and triggered a Distributed Denial of Service attack. It was though one of our most successful petitions, outside of Gurkha Justice, garnering 80,000 signatures, so there’s that, I guess.
FIM Capital (then IOMA FIM), the last of the Assanka customers, chose us to take over support of their fully featured investment management system which we continue to develop to this day. We added additional support around busy quarter end dates and a fully featured helpdesk for problem reporting, initially by importing from Assanka’s in-house system into Trac and later a fresh import into hosted Gitlab, which we now use.
With the CIPR we focused on new server hardware and improvements to their members’ only Continuous Professional Development portal, Ladder, including rebuilding the activity search using faceted Elasticsearch, and migrating their proprietary blog aggregator site The Conversation to WordPress.
In our tenth year working together we took on a large portfolio of clients from Assanka Ltd, as they went on to become FT Labs, and I’m very grateful they considered us reliable and trustworthy partners. Customers taking us up on our offer of development, hosting and fixed price support included the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, legal firm Stone Rowe Brewer‘s secure and searchable document storage application which remains cutting edge, Hampshire Foot and Ankle clinic, James Cooke Coaching, Merrony Wall, Naked Communications, Racepoint, Staines Prep School, Thameside Collaborative Lawyers & Mediators, Windtronics, and Twickenham Town Centre.