Hi all,
A short IRC conversation with kkaefer and some excessively
long bathing
(that is where I think through these complex issues, our
water company
being so grateful to Drupal for those excessive water bills
resulted
in some good ideas about dynamic string (menu items,
taxonomy terms,
user profile labels, etc) translation. It is basically a
rehashing of
the issues we are poking around for a few months now in the
i18n working
group, but hopefully some durable ideas are around here.
http://groups.drup
al.org/node/3772
We need every piece of criticism and comments there to get
this done as
soon as possible. Drupal 6 code freeze is approaching, and I
hope we can
ship a node translation engine and a generic dynamic
translation engine
for Drupal 6 in time, if we keep going without loosing
pace.
Why are nodes and the "other stuff" are different?
By default, people
would like to have their different language version nodes
count visits
uniquely, have revisions separately, support different
permissions, have
different authors, have different workflows, and so on. But
by default,
many people would not like to have taxonomy trees, menu
trees, content
types, user profile field labels, etc set up per language.
That could
result in inconsistent content types, user profiles and
such, and is
very cumbersome to set up. People turning to localizer from
i18n module
all tell these stories (although i18n provides optional
dynamic string
translation based solutions too, but they are optional, and
somewhat
hidden).
Note that we are not wearing eye-shades, so we keep in mind
that there
are some use cases, where node translation should not be
implemented
with separate nodes (eg. simple polls), and there are valid
use cases,
when different menu or taxonomy term trees are required for
sites. So
although Drupal core is planned to provide some default,
both
translation methods will be replaceable by contrib modules,
in case
someone would like to have a more customized solution.
Both node translation and dynamic string translation are in
the pipe,
and we need your opinion about these. Node languages (with
translations
coming next) are already in the patch queue:
http://drupal.org/node/
137376
Now I have a dynamic string translation writeup above, where
we would
really welcome your criticism.
Come and help make Drupal 6 *the* multilanguage release! We
need more
eyes and more opinions!
Gabor
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