[opencms-dev] OpenCMS website localization
Michael Moossen
m.moossen at alkacon.com
Fri Sep 19 18:50:25 CEST 2008
Hi Claus!
> After attending your session on CRE in the OpenCms days I was thinking
> that one could somehow utilize the generic relationship mechanism to
> create such a type of "translation of" relationship.
you are not the only one having this idea ;)
thank you also for your additional ideas to the subject, indeed there
are localized websites that can be easier implemented with the
one-folder-per-locale than the all-locales-in-one-folder approach as
vice-versa... and in any case you will have some use cases that will
have some kind of problems, it does not matter what do you choose.
So, IMHO both approaches are equally important.
And you mentioned the properties issue which i forgot to write about
yesterday. Indeed, if you use xmlpages you are damned, you have to use
properties, like title, description, etc (you could think that an
additional element in the xmlpage could help, but then the FCKEditor
will append some html markup you will have to remove later in your
template... so no go for xmlpages), but using xmlcontents solves
everything you have just to prevent the properties get indexed by Lucene
and that's all.
Kind regards,
Michael
-------------------
Alkacon Software GmbH - The OpenCms Experts
http://www.alkacon.com - http://www.opencms.org
Claus Priisholm wrote:
> Hi Michael
>
> Just adding my 10 cents to the discussion...
>
> I'm all for the one top-level folder per locale. It is the most flexible
> and gives a simple solution to localized properties as well, even on
> folders.
>
> In some cases it makes sense to have shared content (i.e. siblings) and
> in others it don't (i.e. full copies).
>
> In my experience it is mostly a organisational issue as to who can do
> what and how the translation of the pages is handled. Typically if each
> locale is maintained by a country manager or likewise, or the site
> content/structure is allowed to become different from locale to locale,
> then siblings are not the way to go.
>
> Basically the problem is that publishing is not independent between
> locales so you run the risk of a typo on say the English page cannot be
> fixed because the translation of the Korean page is still under way. And
> from an organisational point of view it may be that under no
> circumstances should a country manager be able to publish anything
> related to the international site... In these cases full copies are
> required.
>
> But even when one can work with siblings it is, as you mention, somewhat
> of a challenge to keep things in sync. Siblings as well as copies are
> too generic, they do not themselves imply a "translation of"
> relationship between the resources.
>
> After attending your session on CRE in the OpenCms days I was thinking
> that one could somehow utilize the generic relationship mechanism to
> create such a type of "translation of" relationship. If so the UI would
> have to have some handles to maybe automatically create stub copies or
> siblings for each locale (according to some kind of configuration) and
> so forth.
>
> I haven't had an excuse (nor time) to look further into the subject, but
> maybe you can shed some light on whether or not it would be feasible to
> use CRE for that?
>
> best regards
> Claus
>
> Michael Moossen wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I just want to share my experience with content localization.
>>
>> As far as i know all projects developed by Alkacon (normally i work
>> developing the core) that had to deal with localization were using the
>> several folders with siblings approach. Which is, in my opinion, quite
>> easy to setup but not to maintain, despite some project were also
>> including different approaches to automatic sibling creation.
>>
>> So when i started to develop my first website from scratch with OpenCms
>> (http://www.moossen.net/) a couple of weeks ago, i tried a different
>> approach.
>> And i thought it would be enough with a single folder structure for all
>> locales, a 10 LOC locale handler (see
>> org.opencms.i18n.I_CmsLocaleHandler) and a cookie.
>>
>> But this turned out to be a very bad and naive idea, mainly because one
>> URL is having different content:
>> - try to flush browser cache when the user changes the locale.
>> - try to tell google that he has to set a cookie for indexing different
>> languages.
>> - The same applies also for the static export, and everything else...
>>
>> so, for now i am just appending a meaningless lang parameter to every
>> url, which is working but awful :(
>>
>> But i learnt by heart that you MUST have different URLs for different
>> locales.
>>
>> My next try will be (as soon as i get the time for it) to implement a
>> resource initialization handler (see org.opencms.main.I_CmsResourceInit)
>> with a link substitution handler (see
>> org.opencms.staticexport.I_CmsLinkSubstitutionHandler).
>>
>> The idea is to have in OpenCms a single folder structure that will look
>> to the outside world like several folders for the locales.
>>
>> On one side, the resource initialization handler will intercept the
>> requests and remove the leading locale folder from the URL (if you
>> request /en/index.html, it will read the OpenCms resource at /index.html).
>>
>> And the link substitution handler will generate the links with a locale
>> folder prefix. (if in /index.html you have a link to /about/contact.html
>> (and let say the selected locale is en (with a cookie, for instance), it
>> will generate in the html output a link to /en/about/contact.html.
>>
>> I hope this will workout as i expect, and i was just checking the API
>> and it seems to be easier to implement than i thought, so i better start
>> to code now ;)
>>
>> Hope that helps
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Michael
>>
>>
>>
>> Carl Alex Friis Nielsen wrote:
>>> No - the content resides in the resource.
>>> The locale property can be set by simply having all material that shall
>>> be available for a given
>>> locale under a folder with its locale property set to the desired locale.
>>> It really is quite simple to set up and use.
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> *From:* opencms-dev-bounces at opencms.org
>>> [mailto:opencms-dev-bounces at opencms.org]*On Behalf Of *Martin Wunderlich
>>> *Sent:* Monday, September 15, 2008 11:57 AM
>>> *To:* The OpenCms mailing list
>>> *Subject:* Re: [opencms-dev] OpenCMS website localization
>>>
>>> OK, but that means the content needs to be externalised to
>>> properties files, right? In our case, we non-technical people
>>> creating the original English content and they wouldn’t necessarily
>>> know how to work with properties files.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>>
>>> On 15/09/2008 10:35, "Carl Alex Friis Nielsen" <cfn at kb.dk> wrote:
>>>
>>> You have multiple locales in the same resource.
>>> Which locale is displayed depends on the locale property of the
>>> resource.
>>> Different siblings can have different locale properties.
>>> The properties can be inherited from the folder hierachy in the VFS.
>>>
>>> AFAIK this is a very widely used way to handle multilingual
>>> content in OpenCms.
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> *From:* opencms-dev-bounces at opencms.org
>>> [mailto:opencms-dev-bounces at opencms.org]*On Behalf Of
>>> *Martin Wunderlich
>>> *Sent:* Monday, September 15, 2008 11:11 AM
>>> *To:* The OpenCms mailing list
>>> *Subject:* Re: [opencms-dev] OpenCMS website localization
>>>
>>> Hi Steve,
>>>
>>> Are you saying that you’re using the siblings mechanism for
>>> content in different languages? How would that work? AFAIK,
>>> siblings are basically pointers to the exact same content.
>>>
>>> About the web services interface, does OpenCms somehow
>>> support SOAP calls at the moment?
>>>
>>> Kind regards,
>>>
>>> Martin
>>>
>>>
>>> On 15/09/2008 10:01, "Steve Bryan"
>>> <steve at bright-interactive.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
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>>>
>>>
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