Milkshake

Group:	Internationalization and Localization
Start:	2012-07-01
Team members:	Development team - Amir Aharoni (dev), Joel Sahleen (dev), Kartik Mistry (dev), Niklas Laxström (dev), Pau Giner (design), Runa Bhattacharjee (QA and communications), Santhosh Thottingal (dev)

Presentation delivered on September 2012

Project Milkshake is a project that aims to make generic jQuery components for commonly needed internationalisation features. The project was conceived by the Wikimedia Localisation team in July 2012.

All initial components are being developed because there is a need for them on Wikimedia Projects through MediaWiki. However, it would be shame to not make it easy for anyone to re-use them in any project.

Because of this, we chose to (re)develop all components as generic jQuery libraries, using well documented APIs, so that it is relatively easy to implement and use them anywhere. To allow easy participation in the features, the source code repositories are hosted on GitHub. MediaWiki specific implementations re-use the code from the libraries.

Licenses and contributing

Components are dual licensed as GPL and MIT as much as possible to allow wide adoption. New contributions can only be accepted under these two licenses.

Components

Front end messaging framework

Based on research, we found out that no existing freely licensed i18n framework for JavaScript was available that was as flexible and feature rich as MediaWiki's messaging for JavaScript. Currently, work is underway to implement the specification.

Language selector

Universal Language Selector
Source code: jquery.uls, MediaWiki extension
Available in translatewiki.net

Input methods

Web fonts

Future developments

Based on feedback by Krinkle, future developments may include the addition of ResourceLoader and removal of the MediaWiki JavaScript i18n framework in favour of Project Milkshake components. See also Globalize.