March 1, 2003

I’m trying to find a content-management system, mostly for running a limited-access discussion forum. I’ve already looked at Drupal, which is pretty nice, but I have not yet figured out how to make it fully support Japanese, which is a make-or-break feature.

I can get limited success writing Japanese in Drupal, but (in the best-case scenario so far) the characters wind up being escaped to numeric Unicode entities, which are not editable after being posted, and apparently are not searchable.

I also looked at the Slash engine, but A) the installation instructions assume you are root, assume you are more technically adept than I am, and are very sketchy all around, and B) has the same problems with Japanese.

I suspect the Japanese-handling problems in both Drupal and Slash could be fixed with some minor coding changes, but I don’t know where to start. Messing with the template charsets doesn’t do it.

Other desirable features:
Threaded message structure
Moderation/karma points a la Slashdot
Flexible permissions setup
Straightforward templating for admin

None of the other CMSs or web-BBSs I’ve looked at so far have forum threading,

[Later] Seems that I can almost get Japanese working right in Drupal (why do I think of towering drag-queens every time I say that?) after all: there was a configuration issue that was causing the Japanese to be escaped. I turned that off, and now everything is close to hunky-dory, except for one thing: searching on Japanese terms always returns no results.

[Still later] Turns out a Japanese drupal user has developed a patch. This helps some of the problems I was having (and was already groping towards solving). Still doesn’t enable Japanese searching, though.