All,
It's been quite awhile, progress has been sporadic, but I've recently posted an "installable" version of Multilingual Mediawiki (MLMW) I'm still working on the interface messages, http://mw.visc.us/ is a bit "buggy", but coming along.
Quite simply, I went through more files than I ever thought I'd need to, and added code for an additional column, the language sub-tag ID. I also wrote a parser to load language tag and sub-tag data directly from the distributed tab and text files.
The code is activated with $wgLanguageTag = true; and so, when it is false, the behavior is exactly as it is in the existing MediaWiki distribution.
We've added a "Set" namespace, which acts as the interlanguage linking system.
I'd like feedback, and personal attacks ;-) Keep the bug reports on mw.visc.us, and off of this mailing list.
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/mlmw/
I'm going to try to fill in the missing features before updating the code to the latest MediaWiki revision. I'll post a patch-file to this list in the coming week, which will be perhaps, easier to critique.
In the long-run, I'd like MLMW to support full language tagging and filtering. In the short-run, I'd like MLMW to be a workable option for smaller wiki's and multilingual communities.
Finally, I'd like comments. Should I make MLMW an extension instead of a patch to the core MediaWiki code. If so, I would need to add quite a few new hooks to MediaWiki, some of them in awkward locations.
Thanks all,
-Charles