Varena is a web program that lets you host and evaluate programming problems and contests.

• Get a copy of the code:

    $ git clone https://github.com/varena/varena
  

• Some light local configuration:

    $ cd varena
    $ scripts/setup.sh
  

• Create the database (adapt to suit your needs):

    $ mysql -u root -e 'create database varena charset utf8'
  

• Modify varena.conf to reflect your locale, database config etc.

• Apply any patches to bring the database schema to date:

    $ php scripts/migration.php
  

• Depending on your HTTP server and installation path, you may need to enable and configure various modules: userdir, rewrite, PHP. Suggested changes:

  • Install mod-php5.

  • Enable the rewrite module. This is only used to hide .php extensions in URLs

  • Enable the userdir module if you're working under ~/public_html/

  • Modify the relevant config file to allow .htaccess files:

      <Directory /path/to/installation>
          ...
          AllowOverride All
          ...
      </Directory>
    

  • Restart Apache:

To use Varena in your language, you need three things:

• Install the locale you want on your system
• Make sure there is a corresponding entry in the locale/ directory. Note that the names must match exactly. For instance, if your system has a ro_RO locale, but the locale/ directory has a ro_RO.utf8 subdirectory, localization won't work.
• Someone actually needs to do the translation work for your language. You can be that person! :-) See below for contributions.

We'd like to keep up with localization. You don't need to do the translation yourself, but we'd appreciate it if you tagged the strings that need be localized.

• In PHP, just add a call to gettext() around all literal strings. So instead of

    return 'login failed';
  

  please say

    return _('login failed');
  

• In Smarty templates, use the "_" variable modifier around string literals. We recommend doing this at paragraph level:

    {"String to be localized"|_}
  

You can use sprintf in both PHP and Smarty so you can localize parametric sentences:

    {"User %s obtained %d points."|_|sprintf:"John":"100"}

Note that this syntax does not allow for changes in argument orders between languages. We'll try to live with it.

We use poedit for translation. It needs some light customization for the Smarty syntax (poedit doesn't know it by default).

• Install poedit;

• Run

    poedit locale/ro_RO.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po
  

• Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Personalize and enter your name and email address;

• Under Edit -> Preferences -> Parsers, hit New to add a new Parser. Set these values:

  • language: Smarty
  • extensions = *.tpl
  • parser command = php /path/to/varena/scripts/tplParser.php %o %F
  • an item in input files list = %f

To do the actual translation:

• Run Catalog -> Update from sources;
• Translate any new strings.