Brian Teeman

I'm often asked for an extension that will translate a website into other languages. Although there are several available at JED that provide automated translation services I can never recommend them.

Why? Well if your content is important enough to you to write it in the first place then it is important enough to ensure that the translation is correct and no automated service will ever capture the nuance of a language accurately.

On 14th April 2003 I released a newsletter component for Mambo 4.0 which at the time was one of the only "extras" you could get for a Mambo web site and yet today there are approaching 4,000 extensions for Joomla.

That newsletter component had to be installed manually via ftp and phpmyadmin was required to create the database tables and add the component to the interface. It was also the very first extension to use a WYSIWYG editor - at the time you needed to write all your content using pure html.