I'd like to ask a "big-picture" question. Before I get to the question. I'll describe my scenario, as best I can.
What I'm doing:
I'm working on a multi--lingual human rights portal project for a Spanish human rights NGO (non-governmental organization). One part of the project is to develop a human rights research database. The primary purpose of the research is to gather victimology data on human rights violations since the end of the Franco regime. Effectively what we have is a case management system -- cases/incidents, consequent victims for each incident and the supporting data (although it is retrospective in nature). Originally, I was asked by the project leaders to develop the database schema, now that has expanded into providing a full user-interface. The administrative interface for the data collection will be in Castilian Spanish, but the cases will be worked up in full in all four languages; Castilian Spanish, Basque, French and English. We won't be using translations, rather native speakers/writers, this is primarily due to the cultural/political sensitivity of human rights work. This means we need four different presentation layers for the user access side. The first project I undertook for this was to develop a taxonomy and lexicon to document the database in all four languages. Now we are at the point where the user interface is required to begin data collection.
I've looked at different methodologies for achieving a good result, and I think Xataface may have all the flexibility and features required to get the job done. My other alternatives were things like Symfony or the Zend framework. I was afraid getting involved with that level of abstraction would make it unlikely for them to find a successor for me, if needed (with their budget and lack of expertise). I'm very pleased, as they just about squirmed when we had our discussion on Zend. These are human rights advocates, academics and researchers, not geeks; and they are used to degrees of separation from the gritty side of IT.
Xataface seems to be right-in-the-middle between table editors & custom code and the high learning curve and technology investment of major-league PHP frameworks. I kind of feel like Goldilocks, "yummy porridge. + nice bed for a nap equal a good framework fit". At this point, I'm unsure if we will be using Xataface for the "public access" user interface. We call that phase a "publication system" (it might be integrated with WordPress). The current user-interface I'm working on is really for project members and researchers. When an adequate number of cases have been entered (they have a backlog of manually prepared cases) we are going to work on internal reporting and data analysis, mostly using Navicat and Excel.
I have so far learned that; Xataface has almost all the 'parts' I need already fabricated, a straightforward way to configure things, and the generated applications are reasonably portable. ALL GOOD!
We have a nice VPS with four language specific.servers running on it. We are running a WordPress CMS independently on each server. We also have discussion forums and chat. I have been developing a language affinity cookie system to "home" users on the proper server/application based on an optional language selector, and we have our own navigation system that drops into our content management and forums. Okay, I think I've set the stage.
My thought at this point is to develop with Xataface an admin application (only in Spanish) and four 'user interface' applications, one in each language. It looks to me like, using Xataface, I will be able to avoid creating views in MySQL to alias the data field's labels. We developed a non-language specific coding system for all the indices of tables, and the 'case writeups' (records) have separate 'content fields'/columns for each language.
I'd be very interested to hear if anyone has any comments or thoughts (particularly any traps to be avoided) or has worked on similar problems/issues.
Thanks very much.
