Setting Up the New Urdu Site
While the voting goes on about the domain name, let us consider the tasks we need to do once the domain is available.
The following sites need to be moved to the new domain:
- This blog, Urdu Blogging: We need to switch the blog to Wordpress. Asif, can we use Wordpress 1.5 or should we stick to 1.2 for now?
- Urdu blogs webring: In addition to moving the home page of the webring, I also want to switch it to some php/MySQL-based solution instead of Ringsurf.
- Urdu Planet: This should be simple to move.
- Urdu Wiki: Asif, we need to coordinate on that.
- Urdu Freeware: In addition to Nabeel’s WebEditor and UrduEditor, is there anything else? What about Blogger, Wordpress and Movable Type templates optimized for Urdu blogs? Also, Qadeer, how about putting up the Urdu translation of phpBB here too? Does anyone want to set up a mirror to this?
In addition to moving these to their new locations, we need to do it in a way that we don’t break existing links. So forwarding of each page (and not just the main page) needs to be properly set up at the same time. I would hope that this forwarding would stay up for at least a few months. However, the forwarding/redirect should not be completely transparent to the visitor as we want the visitor to know that the page has moved so that (s)he can update her/his bookmarks. The META Refresh tag seems appropriate for the purpose. The .htaccess Redirect also might work.
If possible, it might also be a good idea to search for links to these items and inform the owners of those websites where the links are that our sites have moved.
In addition to all the moves, I would also like to setup an Urdu forum. Qadeer, can you please help us there? Guys, any ideas of the design of forum topics?
We would also need to maintain the main site as well as other static pages. A CMS would be really useful. Nabeel mentioned a few:
- Mambo
- Drupal
- Typo3
I have heard only of Drupal and that seemed too complicated to me. Also, we have to consider how much modification any of these would need to generate Urdu or bilingual pages. Are there any other CMSes out there that could be useful? If a CMS is too much work right now, how about using Wordpress or other blog software to generate static pages as well?
Among ideas for the future, how about setting up an RSS aggregation of other Unicode Urdu websites (news etc.)? Any other ideas?
Now comes the question of responsibility. Setting all of this up and maintaining it is going to require at least a few people. Therefore, please let me know if you are interested (I am looking at you, Asif, Danial and Nabeel and others too!) I’ll setup shell access accounts for everyone involved. Then we have to coordinate about who is doing what and who maintains what.
May 4th, 2005 at 1:36 am
On internet, I spend my time in stupid things. So if you invite me for the maintenance of the site then my time will be spending on better things. As I think myself indulged in this work so I think it better to say WE. Surely the need of Urdu forum is there. I am thinking about the Categaries and forums names. I will put questions about this on my blog. As we are planning a website for all the people, so all the stuff should be there. The translation and other things should be put there. And I think that META refresh tag is better but it should contain longer time, the link should be put on the page and the page should refresh after at least 10 seconds. Putting the link is necessary because often browsers don’t refresh the page automatically. And also, sending emails to the people is a good idea.
I am also thinking of the design of the page. I suggest a three coloumn page, the right and left coloumns will be updated daily and the central coloumn would be static. There will be news, joke and some other fresh things in the right and left coloumns and the central coloumn will contain the main articles and other things. Also, what about the TechNews in Urdu. As G3TechNews is providing news in English, we should give Urdu News regarding Technology. We should also provide the Urdu Adab there. Jokes, Short Story, Books Reviews, TechTutorials, Poetry and other things.
May 4th, 2005 at 12:46 pm
On the language side of things, Drupal can handle Urdu fine. Bilingual sites are possible with the contributed i18n module. Drupal’s interface can be translated with the built-in locale.module. There is no Urdu translation yet, but it is easy to do if you can get enough people together (we use gnu gettext-compatible .po files).
May 4th, 2005 at 11:44 pm
Zack: I think we can use a suitable CMS for consolidating things likw Urdu Wiki, Urdu forum etc.in one place. Any decent CMS should offer this facility of content integration. We need at least a home page presented by the CMS iteself which in turn is generated using a template. Each CMS has its own system/syntax of describing templates. Each CMS also has a different learning curve depending upon the set of features that it offers and scripting languages that it uses. I suggest that we select a CMS which is based on php and MySQL, not that I am much of a php/MySQL guru. Far from it! The different CMSes that you mentioned in the post all use php and MySQL. I will try giving these a try myself over the weekend. I may write a post about this evaluation if I come up with some meaningful results. Investing time on a CMS is worth the effort, in my opinion. It would provide the flexibilty of adding and modifying sections at will.
قدیر۔ سوچ لو، سارا کام ہم پھر تم سے ہی کروائیں گے۔
May 6th, 2005 at 12:09 am
نہ بھائی! میری بڑھکوں کی اتنی بڑی سزا تو نہ دیں ۔ وہ تو میں نے ایسے ہی بڑھک ماری تھی ۔ مجھے سے ڈیلیٹ کرنے کے سوا اور کوئی کام نہیں ہوتا ۔ اس لیے اگر آپ نے کوئی فائل یا فولڈر ڈیلیٹ کروانا ہو تو بتائیں ورنہ تخلیقی کام تو بہت مشکل ہے ۔۔۔
May 6th, 2005 at 10:35 pm
1.5 is better than 1.2 because we might need the pages feature. Even if we don’t need pages then still 1.5 has other goodies too.
About responsibility, I suggest that we choose Zack as team manager and then he would assign work to us all. Or we can distribute sections among us? Or we can just start doing it like contributing little here and little there each day?
May 7th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
Qadeer: Since the Urdu forum was your idea, I would suggest you manage that. That would include installing it, fixing any problems, updating it to latest versions including patching for security holes, moderating, selecting and adding forum topics etc.
About the other ideas for content, I would say we should start with what we have right now and then add content over time.
Steven: Thanks. We are more interested in having the site content be bilingual in Urdu and English than in having the Drupal interface in Urdu. I hope that would be easy to accomplish.
Nabeel: I agree that a CMS would be good and might even be necessary in the long term. Have you had a chance to try any out yet? I was thinking though that in the short term it might be easier to use weblog software as a site CMS if the effort to learn and adapt the CMS to bilingual is too difficult.
Danial: Have you or Asif made the corresponding changes in WP1.5 like Asif had in WP1.2?
Regardign responsibilities, I think a coordinator is necessary but at the same time it will be good to assign specific tasks to specific people. So someone should take responsibility for managing the Urdu Wiki, someone should manage the Urdu blogging weblog, and so on.
May 8th, 2005 at 4:04 am
Why not use WP or MT as CMS??? I don’t think there should be any problem using WP or MT as CMS in this particular case. I have used commercially available as well as open source CMSes to extremely bizzarre JSP and XML based CMSes and my first thought goes to WP or MT in this particular case. Though, I would re-consider it and let you guys know how I feel about it.
May 8th, 2005 at 3:48 pm
I seem to be a late entrant to this discussion. Just didnt know something was up here.
I take UrduWiki. Moving it to new domain can also be left to me.
->Zack: I haven’t spent time on Wordpress 1.5. Danial is using it so he may help us in this regard.
Please dont go for a too complex CMS. It would be the worst mistake. I haven’t used myself but heard of people using WP for CMS. So Ejaz’s idea is worth consideration.
->Zack: Too many copies of UrduBlogs’ indices are confusing and time-consuming. I remember you once asked for solution. Any thoughts on it?
May 9th, 2005 at 2:18 am
Zack, I am using 1.5 but I only changed the stylesheet for the admin section. I am using Tahoma every where, which makes the admin interface usable. I didnt modify any corefiles. Since I am comfortable using this one I think it wont be much complicated for other contributors. All we need to do is to download 1.5 and open the admin style sheet and change all font to begin with Tahoma. Secondly there is Urdu-trackback issue which needs to be resolved. Lastly we would need to create a theme. We also need to start working on wordpress translation project.
My computer is suffering from some mysterious disease. I took it to a computer geek who told me that your computer is just too old to fight any disease. I will get back as soon as find a young, fast and new computer.
May 9th, 2005 at 10:01 pm
Ejaz, Asif: Regarding WP or MT as CMS, isn’t that what I said too? If the site grows extensive later, we might need a full-fledged CMS but right now it might require a lot of effort to get it to work well and look well in a bilingual situation.
If I remember correctly, WP 1.2 didn’t have much options for use as a CMS but 1.5 does. Has anyone used that functionality?
Asif: About the Urdu Blogs list, I am thinking of consolidating all the different lists and webring together. I might have to write a bit of PHP code for that though. I think there is PHP code available for a webring based on data stored in a MySQL database. If we modify that code to create blog lists as well as the config info for Urdu Planet, then we are all set. The other thing would be to semi-automate people adding new blogs to the list (semi-automatic because it has to be moderated).
Asif, Danial: You guys need to think about Wordpress. We’ll need to use it for this blog as well as for the site CMS (may be). The Urdu-related modifications need to be done. I’ll help you guys in migrating this blog over to WP.
May 10th, 2005 at 6:49 am
Discussion on Urdu Content Management
There is an ongoing discussion about the choice of a back-end system for the proposed Urdu portal. I have been asserting the need of a content-management system (CMS) for the creation, integration and management of Urdu content. I have practically…
June 25th, 2005 at 11:13 pm
Urduweb
Urduweb.org is finally up, though there is almost no content there. We’ll move everything there soon as well as create new content.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
plz visit http://www.bbcone.net & http://www.safdardanish.com latest urdu news website in the world.
thank u
November 8th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
plz visit http://www.bbcone,net / http://www.safdardanish.com / http://www.aljohra.net
thank u