Hi!
I have a quite large experience with "big" CMS like DAY Communiqué, Tridion, Documentum and with others like Typo3 and eZPublish. The "big ones" are much too expensive, Typo3 is simply badly written and a nightmare to use for the end-user, and eZPublish, while being extremely powerful, is just "too much" when you need to quickly deliver prototypes. And the philosophy of eZPublish is sometimes also a problem for the end-user.
After trying (installing, following the tutorials, looking at the code, following the forums, etc.) Joomla, Drupal, Plone, ModX and Silverstripe I think Silverstripe is by far the most promising open-source CMS (with ModX just behind).
So, I would like very much to develop my next projects with Silverstripe but I've some questions I was unable to find answers for in the forums. And there are "features" which are must-have for me. I can wait some time if these are feature currently in development, and if it's possible, I'm willing to help as much as I can.
I mainly works for Swiss firms and the I18N (multilanguage) support is extremely important. In Switzerland, a web site absolutely need to be able to support at least French, German, Italian and English. And, more and more often, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Hindi are requested.
My questions, then:
- what is the status of the multi-language support? Is there a planned date for the release of a first version? I know there is a very promising GSoC project for this.
- I was very surprised to see that the table in the DB use the mysql default latin1-swedish collation. Do you plan to switch to a full utf-8 database schema with UTF-8 collation. This is especially important if we want the fulltext search of mysql to work correctly with I18N content. (for exemple, "Eté", "été", "ete" must be considered the same when indexing and searching).
A big thank you for any help regarding this issues. I very much want to use Silverstripe and I hope those I18N "problems" will be solved in the very near future.
François
PS: sorry for this very long first post and for my not-so-good english.