JoomfIsh and the Mambot that was

Joomf!sh (www.joomfish.net) was inspired by a school of piranhas. That said, it’s a great tool for a multi-lingual website if you want to maintain control over your translations. Simply put, it’s an extension of Joomla which allows you create a website with more than one language version.

Some background

I was working on a booking system with tourist packages for the Soccer World Cup 2010 event. The packages were mainly targeted at Brazillians and, had to be detailed on the website in both Portuguese and English. There are a number of tools for multi-lingual websites that do translations for you automatically. I've found that these tools are horrible DIRECT translators and if your target market shows off degrees of Language studies, then you might need to re-think the usage thereof. By some Googling luck, I found Joomf!sh.

Please go through the documentation or videos for installation steps and tips to get the JoomFish going; It took me about 3 hours (should take you much less having read this blog post); Mine is not to guide you through installation steps.

There’s a secret Brazillian Piranha-God ritual prayer that one can sing when being attacked by Piranhas and the school will leave you unharmed. Like a parrot, that’s not applicable in the world of zeros and ones! The following are some lessons learnt that might save you your manhood:

Lesson1:

The documentation states that JoomFish 1.7 requires Joomla 1.0.7 or above and write access to the following directories:

• Mambots/system
• Mambots/search
• Modules/
• Components
• Administrator/components
• Includes/js/ThemesOffice

This means that if you’re installing Joomfish on a remote server you’d have to change the respective folder permissions. If you’re using Joomla version 1.5 you’ll notice that this mambots folder does not exist! After some more Googling I found that, since version 1.5 the "mambots" folder was renamed to plugins. In the time of finding this solution a gastrotrich had lived a good part of its life!

Lesson2:

After installation I noticed that the default flag for the Brazillian Portugues language pack was wrong (it displayed the Spanish flag). Mierda! If you go to the Joomf!sh “Language Manager” there is a text-field for specifying which image to use. I tried specifying the file location in this text-field and it didn't work. After much fiddling around I changed the “Short Code” text field to 'br' and got the right flag. To get the Short Code for your chosen country, you’ll have to look through the Joomf!sh flag images folder. Sterkte!

Lesson3:

A case of re-occurrence of events whose lessons were mildly taken; What makes it more of an itchy ball is that I also blogged about it a while back. This could be SA Domain specific, but remember that the folder where temporary data is stored should be /var/www/tmp/ in your config file.

Great men leave you hanging...