MyBB Community Forums

This first post may grow quickly as I go through the issues I have. Although I must sleep soon.

Dashboard


The only way I can work around this issue is to add two HTML elements in the string and then some CSS that magically displays the correct element. I don't want to write CSS in a language file. But that is what I did:

$l['dashboard_description'] = "Tämä näyttää joitakin yleisiä tilastoja, jotka liittyvät keskustelualueeseesi. Voit myös lisätä muille ylläpitäjille näkyviä muistiinpanoja.<style type=\"text/css\">td .finnish2 { display: none; } td.last .finnish1 { display: none; } td.last .finnish2 { display: inline; }</style>";

$l['threads'] = "<span class=\"finnish1\">Keskustelut</span><span class=\"finnish2\">keskustelua</span>";

Forum Management
These are evil:

• Forums in "{1}" ($l['in_forums'])
  
• Forum Permissions in "{1}" ($l['forum_permissions_in'])
  
• Forum Moderators in "{1}" ($l['moderators_assigned_to'])
  

Again a mixed context issue: these are used for both categories and forums! In English this is OK, you have "in" as a separate word and it works in both cases. But in Finnish it is the word that changes. Lets say I had a category with the name Kampa. The most correct translation for the first string on the list would be "Kamman huoneet" (Forums in Kampa). I guess you can see the problem: Kampa -> Kamman. However, if the string was properly in it's own context (both category and forum case have their own) then I could simply use a slightly longer version: Huoneet kategoriassa Kampa (Forums in Kampa category). While this isn't as smooth language it is good enough.

But then there is the same string issue where category and forum case are mixed into the same string. I can only facepalm at this in the Spede way:


The most elegant solution I can come up with is to introduce a new term that somewhat can be used to talk about both categories and forums.

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Now that I spent some more time analyzing the Admin CP, it seems that forums and categories are quite messed up as a term even in English. Category appears to be an afterthought of a kind and it is just technically implemented as a forum, and while this technical solution is OK in my books it isn't as OK to have it so mixed up as a concept in the UI. I find it a bit odd that when I'm adding a forum I may end up adding a category instead after everything else refers to a forum.

With 2.0 you may want to rethink how forums and categories are separated in the UI even if you keep the technical solution exactly the same. Of course I'm in a minority with such attention to this kind of detail, but you can think of me as an advocate of doing things right.