[opencms-dev] Support for multilingual content...?

[Thomas März]

First some notes:
      - I am using for each language a different folder, e. g. 
        /de/
        /en/
        and for all of them the same templates.

      - The template uses localized strings to use different messages in
        the generated HTML-page.

      - The folder structure is the same. So I can directly link from 
        /de/a/b/c.html to /en/a/b/c.html and vice versa. If
        e. g. /en/a/b/c.html does not exist, no link will be generated
        or I link to a default page.

      - I used this for http://www.digitalradio.de/

Laurent Gauthier <lgauthier at opnworks.com> writes:
> The current way to handle multilingual content appears to be to create
> parallel folder trees for each desired language. However, this doesn't
> allow explicit references between the various local-specific versions of
> a given page. If one updates a page for one locale, the system cannot
> "know" or "guess" that the corresponding page(s) in the other languages
> need to be revised or updated.

I think this is the problem of the user. He should update the other sites.

> One way to address this would be to have a resource (a CmsFile) contain
> a Collection (Map?) of contents, one per desired locale. 

> Looking at the OpenCMS source and JavaDoc, it appears that this would
> have far reaching implications and require substantial refactoring of
> core classes and may also affect the way OpenCMS retrieves content from
> the VFS (essentially, all content acccess would need to be Locale
> sensitive). In other words, it may be quite disruptive to the system as
> a whole.

So you only want the same page to set the content and the properties for
every language again. So im using a second page.

> My questions are thus the following:
> - Do others agree there is a need to support multilingual content?

Well, for my needs I didn't miss anything to solve multilingual sites.

> - Has anybody come up with a tentative design/solution that could
> quickly and easily meet most of the requirements without too much
> disruption?

Well, for my needs I didn't miss anything to solve multilingual sites.
I think your suggestions are too inflexible.

> Feedback, comments, suggestions etc are welcome.

A nice feature would be to have a dropdown in the WYSIWYG editor to
switch to different language pages (like to different body-elements) and
edit the content. Dependent on the folder structure, for each /locale/ a
now option to select.

Thomas