history.html

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<h2>History</h2>
<p>
In 2003, when the French Perl Mong(u)e(u)rs began organising
their YAPC::Europe in Paris, they thought about the web site
and what they wanted to do with it. Starting from Sylvain Lhullier's
prototype, Éric Cholet and Philippe Bruhat created a conference web site
that was multilingual, template-driven, and able to manage the users, talks,
schedule and payment.
</p><p>
The year after, when preparing the first French Perl Workshop, Éric and
Philippe worked on a second system, designed from the beginning to support
everything the old site could do, with one difference: it had to support
multiple conferences. Act (A Conference Toolkit) was born. They wanted
to support several French Workshops without having to recode a conference
web site engine every year. Laziness is a lot of work... <tt>:-)</tt>
</p><p>
The <a href="http://www.yapceurope.org/">YAPC Europe Foundation</a>
was created just after YAPC Europe in Paris, to help and support the
organisation of Perl conferences in Europe. Since YEF and Act are hosted
on the French mongers system, it was only natural that Act became a part
of the service provided by YEF.
</p><p>
As of November 6, 2008, Act supports 17 languages:
Belarusian,
Chinese,
Croatian,
Dutch,
English,
French,
German,
Hebrew,
Hungarian,
Italian,
Japanese,
Norwegian,
Portuguese,
Russian,
Slovak,
Spanish and
Ukrainian.
</p>

<h2>Is Act the official Perl conference software?</h2>

<p>
Certainly not, but
<a href="http://www.perlfoundation.org/">The Perl Foundation</a> has
shown significant interest in Act:
</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://news.perl-foundation.org/2006/03/i_need_a_perlbased_conference_1.html">I need a perl-based conference system</a> (March 31, 2006)</li>
<li><a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2006/10/moving_toward_a_conferences_to.html">Moving toward a conferences toolkit (ACT)</a> (October 6, 2006)</li>
<li><a href="http://news.perl-foundation.org/2007/01/a_conference_toolkit_act_goes.html#more">A Conference Toolkit (ACT) Goes Open Source</a> (January 26, 2007)</li>
<li><a href="http://news.perl-foundation.org/2007/04/yapcna_registration_open_with.html">YAPC::NA Registration Open with Act</a> (April 2, 2007)</li>
<li><a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2008/02/more_yapcs_more_act_translatio.html">More Perl Events, More Act! Translations</a> (February 4, 2008)</li>
</ul>

<p>
However, becoming the official Perl conference software is on the
roadmap of our world domination plan! <tt>;-)</tt>
</p>

<p>
You can see the progress of Act adoption within the Perl community in
the following graph (<a href="http://www.yapceurope.org/conferences.yml">raw data</a> hosted by the <a href="http://www.yapceurope.org/">YAPC Europe Foundation</a>):
</p>
<img src="act-conferences.png" class="center"/>

<h2>Name</h2>
<p>
The name of the toolkit is <u>Act</u>, not ACT.
</p><p>
Even if it looks like an acronym (inspired by the one of
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_%28programming_language%29">APL</a>),
it is more of an inspirational injunction to conference organizers to forget
about hacking the website and organize their conference. In short: "Act!".
</p>

<h2>History of Act language support</h2>
<p>
Act started as a bilingual tool (French and English), but over time, many
new languages have been added:
</p>
<ul>
<li>French (fr) and English (en) translations available from the beginning</li>
<li>January 2005: Portuguese translation (pt)</li>
<li>February 2005: Italian translation (it)</li>
<li>April 2005: German translation (de)</li>
<li>January 2006: Hungarian translation (hu)</li>
<li>March 2007: migration to .po files</li>
<li>March 2007: Dutch translation (nl)</li>
<li>October 2007: Hebrew translation (he)</li>
<li>November 2007: Russian translation (ru)</li>
<li>February 2008: Belarusian translation (be)</li>
<li>February 2008: Japanese translation (ja)</li>
<li>March 2008: Croatian translation (hr)</li>
<li>August 2008: Slovak translation (sk)</li>
<li>August 2008: Norwegian translation (nb)</li>
<li>September 2008: Chinese translation (zh)</li>
<li>November 2008: Ukrainian translation (uk)</li>
<li>November 2008: Spanish translation (es)</li>
</ul>

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