Internationalization
Though Slashdot was originally the brainchild of Midwest American geeks, the site has reached a worldwide audience. Extending the successful idea, several native language sites sprang up using the Slash code. Of these, Barrapunto (http://www.barrapunto.com/) may be the best known. It’s the Spanish-language equivalent of Slashdot. Other international sites cater to Italian (http://slash-italian.kenobi.it/), Hebrew (http://www.orik.co.il/), and Japanese (http://slashdot.ne.jp/) audiences. Potential administrators with non-English speaking audiences can adjust their site to serve up nearly any language represented by computers.[48]
Beginning with Slash 2.0, most of the text aimed at endusers has moved to templates. This makes it possible for administrators to translate things without having to edit comments buried in Perl code. From the Admin menu, it’s possible to change the templates, blocks, and all other messages stored in the database.
Of course, the underlying software must also support internationalization.
By default, MySQL operates on the ISO-8859-1 or Latin character set. The
choice of character set governs the string sorting order. (For example, a
character set without accent marks over vowels will treat
“è” much differently than “e”.) This directly
affects GROUP BY and ORDER BY clauses.
Depending on compile-time options, MySQL can switch character sets as necessary. Official binaries from MySQL.com have compiled-in support for complex character ...
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