New developers welcome, any help you can provide this project is always appreciated! My guess is that you want toe help out because you see a real usefullness in this project within your own work, well I think your right! The aim of this portal is to be completly dynamic and adaptable to anyone's needs.

It is absolutly vital you read this documentation before entering the SVN repository and hacking away. If you have questions or whould like help on anything you think would improve the project I am always ears wide open and open minded. Please continue reading the documentation.

Generally speaking we use the standard SVN repository layout and rules. Read the Subversion documentation available at subversion.tigris.org.

A few important facts to point out are:

• The trunk is always operational, if anyone downloads the trunk and tries to run it they will not have any major errors
• Use branches to work on experimental code and merge it to the trunk when it is working.
• The tags directory contains only released packages, everytime a new package is released it gets tagged!

You can also view this structure by browsing the trunk of the SVN repository. But it is coupled with detailed descriptions here. The project is being designed not to depend on this directory structure completely so users can put the js_lib and core_data in different places by updating the portal.html to point to the new locations (they must be web accessable though).

	htdocs
	`--images
	|  `-- [... images ...]         (This is self-explanitory)
	`--core_js_lib
	|  `-- *Manager.js              (Managers provide the accessable API)
	|  `-- *.js	                    (All javascript files go here)  
	`--core_css                     (css files)
	`--core_data
	|  `--language                  (Contains all of the language files, like message.properties in JSF)
	|  |  `--en_us.txt              (language files are based on country code)
	|  `--ConsoleManager            (Output html for the console, accessed via AJAX)
	`--core_php_lib					(Because JavaScript cannot handle some actions a limited amount
	|                                 of Ajax accessable scripts will need to be written in various
	|                                 languages, the original will be in php)
	`--index.html                   (Dummy index)
	`--portal.html                  (The interface page, it loads the required jscripts and provides                                       the basic div structure to allow the javascript to do it's magic)
	

Lets get right down to it. The Language Manager class provides the API for internationalizing the application. Although the translations are not my forte the ability to have them is. There are properties files much like JSF and JSP that contain variable names that link to translated texts. The files are located in the core_data/LanguageManager/*.txt area with a file name from the nation iso code. Through the Alpha stage there will only be one 'en_US.txt'. But whenever creating output it is vital to use the language layer instead of hardcoding. This is different for debugging output, debugging output can be in all english.

Steps to adding internationalization capabilities.
1.) Open the en_US.txt file and enter a variable=Some Text combination (save file).
2a.) Insert into your code 'LanguageManager._getMsg('variable');' where you want the text to be displayed.
2b.) If the content you are adding is not dynamic than you will want to add the text to the initialized text array so that if the user changes the language in mid use your static texts will be changed as well. To do this try: 'LanguageManager.addTexts(("divId=var1","divId2=var2","divId3=var3"))' notice you are not sending a variable to value combination you are instead sending an DOM id tag value to a variable. (You still need to insert the variable to value combination in the en_US.txt file.)