[opencms-dev] OpenCMS website localization

[Steve Bryan]

Hi

One usability problem we found is that when an editor creates a page in one
language folder (eg under en), the siblings do not get created automatically
in the other language folders (which for us is generally required except for
the odd case that the pages are only in one of the locales).

One solution to this would be to customize OpenCms to add a
'copy-to-all-locales' function, either on the create dialog or (more easily)
as a separate context menu function. The latter can be done by adapting the
regular copy function to copy out siblings to the other locale folders.

An associated problem (which I think Martin is referring to), is that title
& navtext properties etc would normally need to be translated as well as
elements of pages and structured types. One work-around for this, is to add
title and nav-text page elements, and use them instead of the properties in
the template navigation. The ideal is to ensure that all properties are
locale independent (and hence a straight sibling copy does the job). Any
locale dependent stuff should go in page elements. Then only the page bodies
need translation.

After that, we have a batch translation system that sounds like a much less
advanced version of Martin's :-) - ie exporting pages, getting the
translation company to fill in the control code, then re-importing. The web
services idea sounds good.

Steve


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:23:52 +0100
From: "Martin Wunderlich" <mwunderlich at salesforce.com>
Subject: Re: [opencms-dev] OpenCMS website localization
To: "The OpenCms mailing list" <opencms-dev at opencms.org>
Message-ID: <C4F001C8.2D0D%mwunderlich at salesforce.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Hi David,

We currently have 17 different locales on our website (5 of them English
language) and it works somehow like this:

 *   The localised sites are located under sub folders of the main domain,
whereby the subfolder name consists of the ISO country ID, e.g.
www.salesforce.com/es for Spanish.
 *   Some locale specific content is externalised to properties files, but
not the main body text of the pages.
 *   Translation is generally a one way street from en-US to all the other
locales.
 *   To get a web page translated, we run an export that picks up the
respective pages, based on a custom property that we have included in the
templates. The export file then gets dumped to an FTP server, from where it
is picked up every so often by the translation management system (feels a
bit ancient, IMHO; this should happen in real time through a web services
interface).  We do some automated tweaks to the manifest file of the export
file (replace locales IDs and such) and then import back into OpenCms.

Some things that I really miss are better support for image localisation,
the web services interface mentioned above, and a better OpenCms interface
for sending files for translation. Also, it would be great to have a WYSIWYG
interface for externalising information to properties files, so that
non-technical content editors can create properties on the fly.

Cheers,

Martin


On 01/09/2008 11:41, "David Valls roure" <david.valls at sogeti.com> wrote:

Hi All,

i'm having some issues regarding web site localization and I want to
review if i'm doing well...

This are my steps:
1.- new folder www at /sites/default
1.1.- properties-advanced-locale: en
2.- some content-> pages with free text
3.- new folder news at www
4.- add some news inside

ok, now i have my website in english

How to localize?

1.- copy all, even siblings from www to www_es
2.- Administration-> Merge pages -> from www 2 www_es
3.- Change locale-> www_es (include subfolders) from en 2 es
4.- Open website and traduce all...
That's what i've done.

repeat this steps for other languages...

The first thing i want to know if i'm doing well... because now i have
a problem: when i add content like pages with free text i can merge
and goon, but with news i cannot localize them... i can't copy them to
corresponding language folder...

How do i create localized (multilanguage) sites?
How do i mantain localized (multilanguage) sites?

Thanks in advice,

David.