Hi.
I have some general problems/questions regarding the use of
Plone with
mutlilingual content via Lingua Plone.
1) There are two different cases that I can imagine,...
multilingual support,
and locale support:
Multilingual support is that content is translated to
different languages,.. so
for example en, de, fr, etc.
Locale support is that the content varies depending on where
the reader comes from.
I'm not sure what the combination of language and country
codes should mean,...
does en_US mean American English or is it just English with
content for United
States?
I've read RFC 3066 but did not really understand it,.. but
I thinkg the 2nd,..
English for someone wo comes from US would make more sense.
I can imagine the following example where this may be
usefull:
An article with contact information,.. available for de,
de_DE and de_AT
de might be just German with not specific content so a
telephone number might be
written as +49 123 45678
de_DE might be for readers (of German language) from the
country Germany. They
can ommit the +49 (because they're already in Germany) but
must use a 0 at the
beginnging,.. so the number might be written as 0123 45678
People from Austria (de_AT) must use 00 for the +,.. so it
might be written as
0049 123 45678
That is the way I think LinguaPlone should be used,.. is
that true? Or is this
independant from geographic localisation an means simply
American or British
English etc.?
With the following questions I suppose that my idea, of how
all this is indendet
to be used, is correct.
(btw: Lingua Plone shows them as en-us and en-gb and so
on,.. I rembember that
somewhere in the standards it says one should use the form
en_US).
2) One thing that I don't like is that Plone creates new
objects for each
translation.
If I have a document called contact,... it does not contain
all different
languages, but for each new translation a new document is
created e.g.
contact-de-at.
This is bad I think,.. first of all it will make problems
with links to that
document (e.g. internal links from other docs) and it does a
little bit
discriminate the contact-*,... contact itself may be written
in en,.. and
translations added as contact-de, contact-fr,... so it think
in this example it
would be discriminating that the "main" contact
document is in English.
Wouldn't it be better to have one common uri for all the
different language
versions, and just have something like
"?lang=de_AT" added to it. The later is
already done in Plon,.. but additionally to different
document names.
3) How should the language/localisation be choosen for a
visitor?
a) "?language=foo" attached to the uri
b) Users manual choice: The language icon he clicks in the
website (thus cookies)
c) Users manual choice: What he selects in his personal
profile
d) What the user has set up in his browser
e) Site default
4) What general scenarios can I imagine for a website with
mutlilingual content?
In nearly every case,.. not all content will be available in
all languages.
Imagine a site with e.g. support for 6 or more
langugages,... if someone adds a
newsitem it might be too unimportant to translate it...
Ok,.. the site admin might choose between the following
solutions:
a) When a user chooses a language (see 3a-3d) he sees only
documents in this
language,... meaning: if the document he requests is not
available in the
language,.. he sees an error (and perhaps a list of the
available languages) AND
_even_ navigation/menu and so on are influenced by this
setting,.. so they only
show content of the selescted language and hide every thing
else.
=> as far as I can see,.. this is what LinguaPlone
currently does, right?
b) (The solution that is the best in my opinion):
If the users opens a specific document/image/etc: If (and
only if) the user
selected a language via 3a) it should be tried if the
document is available in
that language,... if not,.. then if (and only if) he
selected a language via
3b,.. and so on.
If the document is not even available in the site default
language (3e),.. the
users should get an errror and a list which available
languages.
With that solution you get one thing automatically,... a
user might have
selected in his browser the following:
1) de_DE
2) de
3) de_AT
4) en
When he opens something and no language is specified via
3a/b/c the document
would be presented in his language and for his geographic
location (remember my
telephonenumber example),.. so if the contact page is
available for
German/Germany,.. it would be a 0123 4567,.. if not,.. the
next best choice for
him would be the German/no geographic position (de)
document,.. and so on.
The same thing should happen for the menus/navigation,..
I currently make a site for some friends,.. its beta only
but you can visit it
at http://hilbert.scientia.
net/
It's mostly in German (de) independant from the geographic
position,.. but some
parts (i.e. /contact) is available for de, de_DE and
de_AT,... but when I select
de_DE or de_AT,.. can't see any other content,... (the
documents in de_only)
which is a very bad solution,.. my way described in 4b)
would solve this I think.
5)
Perhaps this should even be totally split (at least in the
users profile the uri
parameters and the site default)
So for 3a) one would have
"?language=de?position=DE" or sth. like that,..
perhaps extensible for regions and so on (in US you'd have
the states,.. CA,
NY,.. etc.)
3b) The Icons should be changed,.. the solution showing a
flag is very bad
because: de, en, fr should never show a flag,.. as they
don't "belong" to
Germany,... UK/US or France. The Icons with a foo_BAR might
use a flag but I'd
also recommend against it but e.g. for Swiss you'd have
de_CH, fr_CH but for
both the same icons.
3c/e) Seperate fields where the users/admin sets the default
language/geographich position. The site default for
geographich position should
be recommended to be set to none or sth. like that.
3d) stays the same because it's from the browser ;)
Excuse me for my mistakes,.. but it's so late here,.. my
English is much better
under "normal" conditions 
Please discuss my suggestions for LinguaPlone 
Regards,
Chris.
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