Collecting all multi-language content requests and proposals

Just a quick $0.02 on my expectations of a multi-language system. Forgive me if I’m reiterating things that others have said elsewhere or if this isn’t completely relevant for this thread. But since topic is what it is, I just want to put down a couple of quick comments.

$0.01 - our sites are never page-for-page the same between 2 languages

$0.02 - having the language designation in the URL is not only important for SEO purposes, but it also simplifies usage analysis. I’m thinking about multi-language stores here, where you might want to do split run testing on a particular English page, or run a print campaign to bring users to the French side of the store.. all kinds of business metrics would be made simpler going the language-in-url route

However, no matter how many ways you can imagine implementing multi-language, they’re all going to be someone’s preferred method. Can it be left open and flexible, perhaps so that you can choose whether to go "language-in-url" or session-based, and even play with those choices at any point in the document heirarchy.. all without breaking the content API that the core modules rely on? What a great problem - exciting times for MODx as 1.0 looms.

Quote from: sottwell at Sep 25, 2006, 10:06 AM

Might the new "link attributes" field in the document editor page be useful in this way?

Susan, I think the link attributes is a temporary solution that will likely be moved into the generic metadata features in future releases. The contexts will take care of setting the subdomain, or a base_url for the language, or any other context configuration options that could supplement or override the system and user settings in whatever way best meets the requirements for how you want to organize and present your localized content.

That said, how did you envision the link attributes field to be utilized for this? Just want to make sure I understand what is being suggested...

Quote from: PaulGregory at Sep 25, 2006, 09:52 AM

W3C technicalities are important to bear in mind but they don’t shape the usability or best practice concerns of multilingual content management (And I’ll have to reread that document properly at some point, at first glance some of the ’best practices’ contradict one other). Indeed, that document only really covers one best practice that any web visitor would notice : "Don’t use flags to represent languages". So the usability or best practice concerns of multilingual site structure aren’t really covered there.
...
Thus the "standards board" is MODx, not W3C. OpenGeek is basically saying "There will be a big, well-thought-out core feature". Which is good news, but that doesn’t mean we all have to stop dreaming and start waiting. Additional ideas are always good - particularly ones that will affect the implementation on a site, rather than the core structure.

Agreed Paul, these aren’t best practices for content management; I expect our experiences to drive best practices for using MODx to implement i18n sites. I point to these documents to clarify the technical ways the core can provide the scaffolding on which to do so.

Further, I want to reiterate Paul’s message to not stop dreaming and start waiting -- I welcome any and all input into this process. Although I do have what I believe to be a solid foundation to support this in a way that won’t be obsolete in 2 years, the more ideas that are shared here, the better our understanding will be collectively, and the more things we can get right the first time.

Quote from: netProphET at Sep 25, 2006, 01:30 PM

However, no matter how many ways you can imagine implementing multi-language, they’re all going to be someone’s preferred method. Can it be left open and flexible, perhaps so that you can choose whether to go "language-in-url" or session-based, and even play with those choices at any point in the document heirarchy.. all without breaking the content API that the core modules rely on? What a great problem - exciting times for MODx as 1.0 looms.

That is absolutely my goal here -- i.e. decide what to enable and enforce as globally accepted standards via the core, with the purpose of making it easy to then utilize those facilities to internationalize to your preferences.

I’ve been working with a couple of other MODxers here to add two localized areas of an existing MODx site using a homemade language-in-url solution and the current MODx release. I’ll hopefully have a list of issues/best-practices to share from the experience soon, and I encourage anyone else who has implemented any multi-lingual solutions they can share with the community, to please do so and if possible, describe the localization problems you encountered and/or solutions you came up with during the process in some detail.

OOokkk guys!
I see that you all are concerned with standards and usability... that’s fine...
I think that almost every ideas I heard here can be easily implemented... I mean, mod_rewrite can deal with the SEO stuff, whichever solution we choose. I think that the most important thing is to find out how to deal with snippets/plugins/etc...

I also think that somewhere there has been a PHP variable in which there is the language of the page (be this taken from cookie or from session or whatever). And there should be a field "language" in the content db table.

My thoughts are now going on the manager... is it possible, in your opinion, when you edit a content, to load the content of EVERY translation and then use AJAX to switch between them?

I also would like to know more about the "not identical site between languages" that seems to arise in some post. If two languages have to be two different websites, all this discussion is unuseful... anyway, it seems you say that SOME part of the site you would like to have different from one language to another. Please can you explain better this thing?

Quote from: madmage at Oct 05, 2006, 11:58 AM

My thoughts are now going on the manager... is it possible, in your opinion, when you edit a content, to load the content of EVERY translation and then use AJAX to switch between them?

Sure, but the right way to do this would also be to have a workflow system with automatic notifications when different changes occur to different pages/languages/contexts.

I also would like to know more about the "not identical site between languages" that seems to arise in some post. If two languages have to be two different websites, all this discussion is unuseful... anyway, it seems you say that SOME part of the site you would like to have different from one language to another. Please can you explain better this thing?

That sounds like you’re just running two websites off the same install. That’s very straightforward in the future.

I also would like to know more about the "not identical site between languages" that seems to arise in some post. If two languages have to be two different websites, all this discussion is unuseful... anyway, it seems you say that SOME part of the site you would like to have different from one language to another. Please can you explain better this thing?

I think what is meant is where one language does not have the translation for certain pages that exist on the default language section. For example, the "terms and conditions" page may only be in English. Instead of just copying this English document in the French and the German sections, there would be some mechanism for using the English document’s content, but still keeping the rest of the template in the French or German section.

Quote from: rthrash at Oct 05, 2006, 01:30 PM

Quote from: madmage at Oct 05, 2006, 11:58 AM

My thoughts are now going on the manager... is it possible, in your opinion, when you edit a content, to load the content of EVERY translation and then use AJAX to switch between them?

Sure, but the right way to do this would also be to have a workflow system with automatic notifications when different changes occur to different pages/languages/contexts.

Ah... you are right... so it seems not to be feasible in the near future... at least working on the 0.9.5...

Quote from: rthrash at Oct 05, 2006, 01:30 PM

I also would like to know more about the "not identical site between languages" that seems to arise in some post. If two languages have to be two different websites, all this discussion is unuseful... anyway, it seems you say that SOME part of the site you would like to have different from one language to another. Please can you explain better this thing?

That sounds like you’re just running two websites off the same install. That’s very straightforward in the future.

But doesn’t need any mechanism for multicontext/multilanguage content.

You could set a "base" language and then if there were no translations done, it could fall back to the default base language.

Ryan... I agree with you.

If you do this "look for secondary language/content and if no secondary content exists, show the primary language/content" would be a great approach.

This would work also in other applications..for example, a multi-site not necessarily based on language, but say, on location.

Vanessa

Hi!

This is my first post here. I am seriously interested in using MODx (I come from Joomla!, but I am a bit tired of how difficult is to manage with it, sometimes).

My question is easy: how far/long are we from a "core" or "official" MODx solution to handling multilingual content? I mean, I have already read at this forum that version 1.0 will include a "core" implementation of multilingual features. Is that near tho happen? How long must we wait?

If this question does not apply this thread, where can I post my request?

Thank you in advance!!!

[Sorry for my English.]

@madmage:

I also think that somewhere there has been a PHP variable in which there is the language of the page (be this taken from cookie or from session or whatever). And there should be a field "language" in the content db table.

I solved this quite easily with alias-names.
Set up 3 languages = 3 folders.
3 Templates.
Every page alias has a suffix: -de, -it or -fr (german, italian or french version)

All you need to do is create a little snippet which checks the current page alias, and auto-links to alternative languages (if there is an equivalent transl. available, otherwise display a msg like "this page is not avaiable in __"). Include that snippet in your template once, and you’re set.

I realize this is probably not ideal if you have thousands of pages. The CMS would probably become inefficient. But for small to medium-sized sites, it works.

Maybe a more sophisticated document-search would help, in the manager:
e.g. "show only documents that end with "-de" + order by modification date DESC"
with an option to hide all other stuff not meeting these criteria (avoid clutter in the admin page-navigation).

If you have several translators who need access to the modx manager, you’d want to give each one only access to his/her language files. You can easily create user-groups for that, and mark your documents accordingly.