Re: YAMS: Yet Another Multilingual Solution

So the Wayfinder issue seems to be solved, PMS or I will post the solution when we finally decided for the best way to do it.

Some thoughts:

What happens if I have a page that is not translated? Would it be possible to define an identifier TV which - when empty - lets YAMS don`t build the translation link or creates a link to the homepage (perhaps with hover function/or addtional info like "translation not available - link to the homepage") ? Reason is that not every single page of a website is translated. I have some clients where they have a full translation for german/english, but then only a few pages translated for chinese and russian. For wayfinder it will be a bit more complicated I think. But perhaps it could be done in the row template with phx (ifempty yams title). Will try that.

Quote from: MadeMyDay at Jun 16, 2009, 02:29 PM

2. Much more important: Do you have a plan for different aliases for different languages? This is an absolute must imho. I know this is very difficult because the URL creation of MODx is done with the alias field and there seems to be no way of changing this. But perhaps there is a way of altering it later in the output. Like

Evo 1.0 will have true multi-lingual automatic transliteration. It’s in SVN but not RC1, if that helps.

Hi Ryan,

I already saw that and it is very nice. Before I had to change the core because the transliteration wasnt correct for german. Now it is easier to change it (and already done). But here we have another situation. We have a multilingual solution (a pretty one btw!), which will allow to translate documents without duplicating the tree. But we are discussing how it is accomplished best to allow two different aliase for one document and how MODx can handle it (that is verifying the URL and forward the correct document in the called language).

I dont think the svn-version of the transliteration snippet will do this for us ;-)

What do you mean for transliteration?

1) The automatic translation of a word even using the ’special’ characters used in various languages or
2) The automatic translation of the whole page?

Does it conflict with YAMS or how would it complement it?
Following this thread with great interest and expectation!!!!
Thanks for sharing...

Transliteration is how the page title is automatically converted into an alias for friendly URLs. Evo 1.0 will allow custom transliteration and supports multiple languages.

Great and thanks...

Not that it affects this solution mind you.

Quote from: MadeMyDay at Jun 18, 2009, 10:20 AM

What happens if I have a page that is not translated? Would it be possible to define an identifier TV which - when empty - lets YAMS don`t build the translation link or creates a link to the homepage (perhaps with hover function/or addtional info like "translation not available - link to the homepage") ? Reason is that not every single page of a website is translated. I have some clients where they have a full translation for german/english, but then only a few pages translated for chinese and russian. For wayfinder it will be a bit more complicated I think. But perhaps it could be done in the row template with phx (ifempty yams title). Will try that.

Okay. Currently the YAMS interface allows you to activate or deactivate a language across all multilingual templates, but doesn’t give you the option for disabling certain languages for given mulitlingual templates only or for given documents only. Clearly, both of these things would be very useful for enabling only parts of a site to be translated instead of the whole thing in one go. Disabling languages for specific template could be configured via the YAMS module interface. Disabling languages for certain documents could be specified by an additional multilingual template variable. (deactivate_language_en, deactivate_language_fr,...) This is going to have to be another thing to add to the TO DO list I’m afraid. I hope to find some time at the weekend to start crossing some of these things off the list. Probably start with the easiest ones...

In the meantime, you might want to display some message or other standard text in place of the multilingual fields (pagetitle, menutitle, content, etc.) when the field has not been translated and so is still empty. The easiest way to do this is probably to edit the multilingual template variable (eg: content_en) and set a default value such as "Sorry. Content not available in this language."

About the automatic transliteration. Sounds great. I guess we’ll start seeing more URLs with non-ascii characters in the URL bar then, like this. (Works on Firefox.) I guess that most if not all browsers support displaying Unicode characters in the URL now rather than displaying a load of escape codes like this which is ugly and useless for humans... http://www.dmoz.org/World/Japanese/%E5%90%84%E7%A8%AE%E8%B3%87%E6%96%99/%E4%B8%80%E8%A6%A7%E3%83%BB%E6%A4%9C%E7%B4%A2/%E4%BD%8F%E6%89%80%E3%83%BB%E9%9B%BB%E8%A9%B1%E7%95%AA%E5%8F%B7/

As for YAMS. Yeah, it doesn’t affect it too much. If I manage to get multilingual aliases working at some stage, then it would be nice to write a plugin that would activate automatic transliteration for each of the languages on a multilingual page, rather than just the default document alias (which would become redundant).

Transliteration is how the page title is automatically converted into an alias for friendly URLs. Evo 1.0 will allow custom transliteration and supports multiple languages.

Looking at the Evo changelog I see references to a new system event OnStripAlias, and this note ’Template variable can be created to override transliteration table (file) name on per-document basis’. Could you elaborate how this might work in practice?

Edit: Search and thou shalt find:
http://modxcms.com/extras/package/?package=469