Rating: 5 stars
… use it with care!
This plug-in fills a great need for all those users who create dictionaries (with Flex and other tools) and who need to get them out to the people.
Careful: This power-tool is not so much a plug-in, just WordPress does not offer other categories(?). Webonary works best if you give it its own dedicated “blog” where it can control all posts and all pages. We are doing that and that works swell. Of course you can run another “normal” blog and have it so integrated and inter-linked that your users might not even notice the underlying structure.
Five plus stars for developing this tool.
Today I am moving my actual rating from four to five stars. I would still call it early days. But the team is awesome. We are doing some self-hosting and had some tricky configs (paths) and data. But the Webonary team has given us great help and has even written several new versions. They seem to really care about minority languages. (Yes, I am one of those too, but I am not affiliated, nor will I receive a coffee-maker for this rating (or will I?), nor do I personally know the team. Would like to meet them though.)
Read the documentation very carefully and do give it a try!
Diccoman
]]>Rating: 5 stars
The SIL dictionary plugin allows to load a XHTML dictionary file exported by FLEx https://fieldworks.sil.org/. Each dictionary entry is a blog entry thus replacing all exiting entries. So the rest of the content has to be done with pages. The XHTML file may be loaded as often as necessary. If you use it for what it is meant for it works very fine.
]]>Rating: 4 stars
This plugin enables a user to publish dictionary data online without a lot of technical know how. The plugin takes lexical data in LIFT or FLEx format and publishes it in a format that is functional and usable as an online dictionary. Behind the scenes it uses the WordPress blogging platform, but each dictionary entry is stored as a post. In this sense it should not be thought of as a normal blog, but it has been cleverly designed to leverage the benefits of the popular Worpress platform and apply it to dictionary data.
The SIL Dictionary plugin should only be used for standalone dictionaries. It should not be installed on a ‘normal blog’. It is a specialized plugin that is solely designed for publishing lexical data.
For a good example of a dictionary that use the SIL Dictionary plugin, see the Lugungu Dictionary. The plugin provides the import process that gets the lexical data into the blog. It also provides the search box functionality for the dictionary. The search function is powerful. It allows a user to search the dictionary by partial words just like doing a Google search. The search results are ordered in a weighted result list with the most likely words at the top of the list.
There is an evolving suite of documentation and helps available at Webonary.org.
Don’t be shy to contact the developers of the SIL Dictonary Plugin at Webonary.org/contact. As an end user with dictionary data to publish I found them extremely helpful. While it is true that I did have a number of technical questions and issues when importing my data, I found that they bent over backwards to help and we solved every issue. I am now a very happy user of Webonary (and its SIL Dictionary Plugin) and I would recommend this publishing route to others.
Just remember that dictionary data is complex. Because of this I recommend that you host your data at Webonary.org. The hosting is free and the service is excellent!
]]>Rating: 1 star
Never use this plugin!
I installed it because I was searching for a dictionary plugin for my blog and wanted to check how it looks in the dashboard. Okay, I checked and deleted the plugin. Before deletion it says:
You are about to remove the following plugins:
SIL Dictionary by SIL International(will also delete its data)
ITS data, not all posts! What in the world is wrong with you? Are you freaking kidding me? Can’t you be more specific or maybe you have no idea how to explain things in English?
I read the FAQ, I read the documentation on webonary.org. It doesn’t say anywhere that it connects all posts to the plugin!
For God’s sake, I’m so angry right now.
You know Silesians thought well of SIL International as you gave us some arguments by listing our language, but this is ridiculous.
Never install this plugin! Never! You will lose your whole blog!
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