Another milestone reached — and a few dozen more gremlins terminated!

We're pleased to announce that the Nuci Bici 'Events' section now has its own dedicated content translation engine. This means all listed events can now be made available in 10 languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

It is another step towards making Nuci Bici accessible to an international audience, whether you're discovering an unusual bicycle, looking for an event to attend, or exploring the wider world of cycling culture.

And behind the scenes…

The last two weeks have been busy, even though most of that work isn't visible (yet) from the outside...refining the translation systems, improving the way content is organised and displayed, building the member registration module, and working through the inevitable collection of technical gremlins that comes with building something new.

The result is a more joined-up multilingual website, with dedicated systems for translating the interface and editorial content, alongside the new Events Translation Module. Each improvement brings us closer to a website that can serve visitors in their own language without duplicating content or making the underlying information harder to maintain.

There is still plenty to build, test and improve, but another important piece is now in place.

Onwards! 🚲

Eric

We have decided to bring the Forum and Members' Offers sections online sooner than q1 2027, and are now aiming to have these online within the next 6 weeks.

Instead of launching in our desired 10-language full integration mode, we will launch in English first so we can beta-test and ensure these modules work fully as planned, then build the full language integration on top of it.

Because our desired full language integration doesn't even exist yet, not in any existing forum and in fact nowhere else either, we'll be heading into completely uncharted territory. It's a bit like planning to build a space rocket when only last year the Wright brothers conducted their first successful flight... Although we have already built most of the required logic architecture and have run hundreds of successful tests, the road ahead is still long and inevitably we'll encounter obstacles to overcome...

In short - fly the biplane with English first, turn it into a supersonic jet over the next 3 months, then finish the space rocket ;)

So, yes, it took A LOT longer than expected to get the website working across English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Traditional and Simplified Chinese as well as Japanese, but, in our defence, this was a much bigger undertaking than expected...! Existing plugins did not deliver quite what we envisaged and projected monthly contract costs were rather astronomical. So we ended up writing our own plugins from scratch; one for all of the user interface bits, and a second for the long form content. Changing our build strategy also meant lots of translations needing to be carried out manually rather than relying on a plugin, uploading them, rewriting the coding for the existing pages, testing...and we're still not quite there. Some of the text still needs polishing, and although we were lucky enough to find some volunteers who will  be helping out with checking our German and Russian translations, we still need another 7 for the remaining languages.

Nevertheless, with our two home-brew translation engines now in place, we are now focusing on the Forum and Classifieds sections. The build on these two projects needs a couple of more weeks to get just the way we want it in English,then we'll need to test them and perfect them and only then can we build the final part of the full language integration! Coming soon...

We also did quite a bit of polishing on other aspects of the site, building a temporary Gallery page for instance, which will be replaced when we get the Archive online in Q1 of 2027. We also got rid of a plugin for the contact forms by building our own. And we updated our Privacy Policy, the Website Ts&Cs and wrote the Forum Ts&Cs as well as the Members' Offers Ts&Cs... You may not see it from the outside, but about 120 hours a week is being pumped into this!!!

Over the last few days, we have updated the landing page, completed the links from there, added some visual animation (audio coming soon too) and created a folder to launch the hero bike image. This image will automatically change 13 times a year using the astronomical lunar calendar; new moon, new bike. We have also added a pop-up for the news ticker, allowing you to read the latest article, with a dual close system via the 'close' button and the logo, and a link for allowing you to go to the News section to read more news or do a text-based search to search for key terms in older articles.

We have also added placeholders for all of the pages, and while we work on the forum and archive infrastructure in the background as well as the language engine, we will be doing some more polishing on page visuals and presentation, as the display across different devices isn't quite yet as it should be.

Eric

The Events calendar is alive and working! (and more) September 19, 2026

After many, many coding iterations to get the Event search fully interactive, it now works. The interface allows you to filter on various options and search both upcoming and past events, as well as historical events, featured events, look up events by country or type of event, enter a year, a date range or a single date. This way you can see what events are happening near you, like the next triathlon for example, or, if you happen to be on holiday in Italy next year and want to check out some bike&parts fairs, you will be able to find them. You will even be able to download your selected events to your device as a PDF file! There is still a bit more polishing to do here and there, but from next week onwards the entire interface will be available in 10 languages. The big next step is filling the calendar with events, so please use the 'Submit an Event' button to send them over. For event organisers with several events on the calendar, from next week onwards you will be able to send them over in bulk using .xls, .xlsx, .csv or .ods format!

At the same time, our Forum build is getting to a point where it will be ready to launch in English in the next few weeks. However, we have decided to hold off on launching until our vision for multi-language support has been realised; we want to launch a truly international forum. This means that when an Italian member posts in Italian in the same discussion as a German member in German, that a Japanese or English member can still read all messages in their own language. It's a bit of work, but we think this will make our community far more inclusive, more international and will break the language barriers we've seen in the various forums and facebook groups.

Eric

A good while in the making, thinking and designing off-line about design, features, routing, UI and a few dozen other things, the Nuci Bici website has finally gone live, albeit in a basic format. Over the next few months the Forum will be bolted on, once we have a confirmed town and address for our phase 1 physical location the information under the Museum navigation button will have something specific to say, and in the mean time, we are working to create the infrastructure for the fully interactive and searchable Archive and Gallery section. With thousands of records and archive materials to be added and complete interconnection between records this is quite a monster project! Once the Archive and Gallery block has gone live we will also add a Classifieds section. We will actually call it 'Members' Offers' as it sounds a little more in line with what a museum does - we are not a commercial company after all.

Many profound thanks to our friends and supporters - you know who you are!

Eric