a website for university

[uniwebpw]

Hi,

I need to create a website for my university.

*Bilingual:: The website should be made in 2 languages: all the words in the template design will be in both languages.

*Membership:: there are 5 different types of users: teachers, research workers, administrative staff members, students and anonymous.

*Moodle integration:: teachers should be able to use Moodle from our domain

*Blog. Not sure if I can integrate a built-in Blogger blog into Processwire. Or is there a blog feature already in Processwire?

*Forum would be a nice addition although I'm not sure if it's possible with Processwire?

I think these are the all possible requirements for our website.

Please enlighten me if I can choose Processwire to create my website. Is it even possible to do all the above features? Please, even a small input will be greatly appreciated. Welcome, everyone's suggestion.

I really like the fact that I can have my own design with PW.

Many thanks in advance! 

[kongondo]

Hi Uniweb. Welcome to ProcessWire and the forums

*Bilingual::

Yes, right out of the box. There are various implementations explained here in the forums. Have a look at the docs for starters.

http://processwire.com/api/multi-language-support/

 

*Membership:: there are 5 different types of users: teachers, research workers, administrative staff members, students and anonymous.

Yes, again, there's various implementations. This is about users and access. See this thread for pointers and other links. 

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/3946-membership-module/

 

*Moodle integration:: teachers should be able to use Moodle from our domain

I am not sure exactly what you mean by integration. Moodle is an application in its own right. Did you mean shared users, for instance? Others will be chime in about this am sure.

 

*Blog. Not sure if I can integrate a built-in Blogger blog into Processwire. Or is there a blog feature already in Processwire?

Yes, PW already has a blog profile....it is also easy to roll out your own (this depends on your dev skills though)

http://processwire.com/talk/tags/forums/blog/

http://modules.processwire.com/modules/blog-profile/

 

*Forum would be a nice addition although I'm not sure if it's possible with Processwire?

There's no native PW forum. There has been talk though about developing one. You will be better of (I think) for now using a solution such as IP Board.

 

Sorry for the quick answers. I hope they get you going... ..others will chime in with better responses...

[uniwebpw]

Thank you, Kongondo, for your insightful answer.

I think I clicked on something wrong and lost my previous account here. So, this is still me uniweb as uniwebpw. 

As for my website, the first three requirements have the first priorities. So, I hope I will figure out how to integrate Moodle section onto my website. 

And I also HOPE that a native forum would be added in processwire in the meantime, i.e. while I am creating my website. I wish that Processwire attracts more and more users and becomes very popular 

I will put more questions here when they arise. 

[Pete]

I took the liberty of merging your two forum accounts - the details from your newer one should work fine.

I very much doubt a full-blown forum solution in ProcessWire will appear any time soon - the general suggestion is to use another piece of software. This is because forum software is usually really complex, taking teams of developers at least a year to create and years after that to perfect. I know this is why ryan at least suggests using other software for this side of things - see here: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/572-release-discussions/?p=48129

If you've ever looked at forum admins for the likes of Invision Power Board you'll see that there are dozens of pages just for managing them as well so it's not as straightforward as it might seem at first.

That said, it is possible to build modules that bridge the membership between forum software and ProcessWire. I've done it myself (and will one day get around to polishing and releasing the module): http://www.strategycore.co.uk - note that you would still manage the forum in the forum admin but you then have available the membership functionality and members and their groups exist in ProcessWire as well.

As kongondo says, Moodle is an entirely separate piece of software. I have, in the past, shoehorned several different applications to work together and the results are always painful when you have to update one of them (not usually ProcessWire as the API functions stay the same) but even something like the forum bridge mentioned above could rbeak on a newer release of the forum software as other developers just will not design a good API and stick to it. That's one of the things that makes ProcessWire exceptionally different - ryan has gone for as close to human readable code as possible and it doesn't matter so much how the code works behind the scenes - it could all change behind the scenes (but it won't) and the functions available to you in the templates to pull out the data would still be the same.

I think you may need to step back and take a look at what you want to achieve in terms of functionality as Moodle for example already has its own forum module. No offense intended, but you appear to be looking at different solutions, liking the idea of some of them and then deciding you want them all, rather than explaining what features you need. I would suggest that it is actually possible (with enough time and money) that you could recreate what you want from Moodle in ProcessWire and do away with one of the three software packages entirely, then hook it up to something like IP.Board if you didn't like Moodle's forums, but depending on your requirements from Moodle you could be talking about a year's work easily.

That said, you can have forums, course modules and site pages all just in Moodle, so if time and budget are your constraints then you could already do it all in one package. There are also dozens of categorised plugin modules for Moodle on this page: https://moodle.org/plugins/

[uniwebpw]

hi again,

thank you for fixing my account. I'm trying to figure out from where to start the bilingual functionality. The website's default language will be my native (it's not in the language pack) and the other will be English (we might add Russian as well if required in the future). 

1. First i need to make my template/ design items like menu and other non-content items in both languages

2. After finishing with the design, I need to be able to post news/ ads etc in both languages.

Is there any step-by-step lesson like the "Planet lesson" about how to create a simple bilingual page? If not, then could someone create one please?  I'd just like to learn how to create a simple menu and content in two languages. If I learn the basics, I think it would be easy to continue from there. 

however many times I read and watch I still can't figure out very well. But I really want to make it. Someone help me please!

[uniwebpw]

I think I've started understanding how the multi-language field and url works.

Now, I need to figure out  how to make menu items "Home, About, ... etc" in two languages. I added my language along with the default language. But I can't understand how to make the menu items, aka pages, appear in the correct language when I change the language in admin profile. If I understand this, I think i'll be able to make a text-based menu in two different languages. thanks.

*I don't want to translate the admin interface. I just want to be able to display all the nodes in the page tree (pages like home, about...) in two different languages when i click choose the corresponding language (not sure how to make this too). My menu items are like: Home, About (submenu items in About: History, Structure etc), Admission (submenu items in Admission: Undergraduate (Majors), Graduate(Majors), Registration, Application, Academic Resources, Virtual tour etc), Campus (submenu items: Library, Dormitory etc). When I click on English, all the menu items should be in English, when I click on the other language, all of them in the other language too. How to accomplish this? 

[diogo]

Now, I need to figure out  how to make menu items "Home, About, ... etc" in two languages

You choose where those words come from, in many cases they will be the page title, but not forcibly. Whatever field you use, you have to turn it into multilangual on that field options.

[uniwebpw]

thanks! I can see the pagetitle changes according to the language i typed in the url. Now i need to test the language switch function. I think i'm getting better at pw-ing

[uniwebpw]

how do I make the first language a user sees my language (not english) while the default language in admin is still english because my language is not in the language pack when i installed?

I selected my language in user/guest as default but when i go to: localhost/pw, the home page is still in english. when i go to localhost/pw/pw (where admin login page is) then i can see the link in my language under the login textfield (if i click on the link then i can see the home page in my language). 

is it possible, if i just go to localhost/pw so i can see the home page (and everything else) in my language as the users should see this language first and english as second?

thanks in advance.

[uniwebpw]

I realized that, if i type the names of the pages in my language and change the title of the default language into my language and add english as the second language, then things seem to work properly. am i on the right track? then i changed the urls correspondingly too.

[ryan]

Sounds like you are on the right track. Make your default language the one you want guest to see at the root URL. For setting your own language in the admin, this isn't related to the default language. Since you are a logged-in user, you can choose your language from your user profile.