If I don’t use contexts then how do I associate a language/locale to a sub-tree? I still need this for the translated chunks that use lexicons -- at least.

I’ll try this solution, as I don’t know how to write a plugin yet. If I understand correctly, I’ll also have to change my rewrite rules in .htaccess to map the virtual language folders to the physical ones?

<?php
$lang = 'en';
$pos = strpos($_GET[$modx->getOption('request_param_alias')], '/');
if ($pos > 0) {
    $lang = substr($_GET[$modx->getOption('request_param_alias')], 0, $pos);
}
switch ($lang) {
   case 'fr':
      $modx->switchContext('fr');
      break;
   default:
      // by default, don't do anything
      break;
}
?>

Which is best really depends on your hosting situation. For instance, if you have full control of a dedicated server or VPS, and need more scalability for a large volume of traffic, then using custom index.php’s that directly invoke a specific context will be your best option. This customization is as simple as copying the index.php in the root directory to an fr/ folder and changing the call to $modx->initialize(’web’) to $modx->initialize(’fr’), though you will also need to copy the config.core.php file and make sure the values are correct for the new location.

As for linking related nodes across translations, there is nothing built-in for this in 2.0. Again, this depends on your needs and I expect that several solutions to this will materialize as developers implement similar solutions. This could be as simple as creating a TV on the main page which has a comma-delimited list of translated nodes (and possibly a second TV on the translations that point back to main node), or as complex as creating a custom table to map the relations explicitly.

Once we get to our initial RC releases of Revolution, I’m sure we will be providing sample solutions for these issues. For the time being, your exploration of the subject is a pioneering effort, though greatly appreciated.

(BTW, is there a way to remove the ".html" suffix? I changed the corresponding system property with an empty string, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect)

You could use a plugin to detect the subdomain from the http_host setting, or a particular subfolder in the requested URL, and switch to a particular context based on that information. Or you could create physical subfolders with custom index.php files in each one to prevent loading the main ’web’ context on each request and then switching (i.e. directly initialize a particular context).

Can you elaborate on that? Which solution is the best?
And what about finding the corresponding translated node/URL ?