Q: Huh?

A: TheyWorkForYou.com is open source, and both Ireland and Australia have copies running. However, it was developed over a long period of time with only one jurisdiction in mind (which is fine for them, less so for us), uses therefore a very problematic character set, in no way separates content from design and the current version of PHP (5.3) won't run it at all without generating fatal errors. Which is really PHP's fault for changing almost all its error handling rules.

Q: So...

A: So I'm rewriting part of it to deal with the concerns above.

Q: Which is?

A: The DB schema in this one is reset to UTF-8, and we're dumping the entire web-facing PHP app in favour of a Django (http://djangoproject.org) application. You can use the Django admin already because the entire DB (well, the bits used in Ireland anyway) has been described as Django models.

Django is also templated.  And it more or less requires Unicode, which 
suits us for a large number of reasons, including future support for >1 
languages.

And it supports i18n. Support for which is slightly sketchy here at the 
moment but do please step in and mark strings I didn't get to yet.

Q: I want to make a version of TheyWorkForYou.com which works in my country

A: Then install it, then install this and use it for the web-facing side. A detailed INSTALL file will follow explaining the tweaks we've made, which include some additional tables and recasting the whole DB as UTF8.

Q: What won't it do?

A: Nothing in TWFY's scripts/ or search/ directories are being ported. That's because we don't need to! That's the joy of keeping their schema - all the lovely email alert mailers, Xapian-backed search stuff, or command-line tools should work just fine without modification (* this is a lie. There's a couple of charset issues you'll need to tweak. I'll detail them when the actual web app is done.)

Q: "When the actual web app is done" ??

A: Yeah. It's not finished yet. It still needs:

    * To provide all the search query stuff in a way that's backwards-
      compatible.  That's now progressing at a clip. You'll need xapian.py

    * Several views which aren't finished yet

    * Django-registration and user profile support to handle annotations
      and email alert records

    * The aforementioned i18n strings to be set

    * A design that unsucks.  I'm working on it alongside @SabrinaDent, who
      has the misfortune of having married me.

    * A fixtures file.  We're considering "The Importance of Being Earnest",
      because it's a play, and it's from Ireland.  Plays are good because
      they have characters (members of Parliament) who say things (speeches)
      in discrete scenes (debates) which are surrounded by stage directions
      (procedural text). 

    * Probably other things.  We (kildarestreet.com) really need this thing
      to get finished and it's back on the boil, so to speak, so assume that
      we'll have a feature-complete Django clone of TWFY up and running 
      fairly soon now.  Later we'll discuss forking it into something that
      uses Haystack instead for search, but then you're pretty much on your
      own with email alerts, sadly.  Rather more work would be needed at
      the support-scripts end even than that to change the database from
      MySQL to something else.

--- John Handelaar, 2011-05-17