::EDIT:: Before you read this old post, read this.

Today I want to introduce you to Bitweaver, which is an amazing Open source project for creating full-blown community websites, with a Wiki, Image Galleries, Forums, Blogs, and more. It is a mature CMS (Content Management System), that was originally derived from TikiWiki, years ago. It is in use on many large websites, including Lulu.com. More importantly, the system works, and works well. But still you get wombats like me that want to make it jump through hoops it cannot. I have been working with this product to create a community / political site that I will announce shortly, but because the site was bi-lingual, it came with a unique set of headaches. To add to the headaches, I decided to use PHPBB for the forum, as the module was there for Bitweaver, albeit in version 2.0.19 of PHPBB - which is now at version 3+. The problems I ran into were not eventualy of Bitweaver's, but rather the language files for PHPBB that were wrongly formatted, such that the German umlauts would not display, due to character encoding issues. But here's the thing- I had hours of free help from a German developer for Bitweaver on the IRC channel #bitweaver on Freenode, who was able to suggest numerous different things to try. Without him, and his buddies in subsequent issues, it would not have been possible. So thank you, laetzer, xing, and lester - you do an excellent job!!