001. Localizer settings

Under Administer > Site configuration > Localizer, configure Localizer settings according to the preferences for your site. If you are not sure what your settings should be at this point, you may read the details in the child page of this document to get some better ideas, or do the following as a good starting point:

1. Under Language switching block, leave the defaults as they are (i.e. Hide the current language, Show language name, and Show flags enabled [see detailed installation HowTo for instructions on installing flags]; Flag and language separator blank; Flag icons path as shown [sites/all/modules/localizer/flags/*.png]; and Flag icons size at 16 x 11). By way of example, in a site with English, Italian, and Japanese locales enabled, when you are viewing the site in English, the Italian and Japanese flags will appear with "Italian" and "Japanese" next to them in the Select language block. When you are viewing the site in Italian, the British flag and Japanese flags will appear with "English" and "Japanese" next to them, and so on.

   

2. Under Language initial detection options, enable Detect through browser's locale. What this means is that if the preferred language set in a visitor’s browser is the same as a language available on the site, the site will automatically change to that language. This is mostly for anonymous users, as user-specific preferences can be set by registered users in their own account settings that will over-ride this. Note that anonymous users can still click on a language in the Select Language block to view the site in a different language.




3. Under Language switching options, for a good starting point, enable Redirect front page to the localized version. Note however that it is very important to be sure that Switch by hostname is left disabled unless you know what you are doing. (Using this feature requires setting up Drupal for multi-sites, and setting DNS entries accordingly, so only use this if you are willing to configure Drupal and hosting accordingly first.)





4. Under Content settings, check the box for each content type you want to have the ability to translate. (Note: While you may be tempted to enable everything, you might want to think out your selections carefully. For types with constant user contributed content, such as forums, keeping up with translation might actually be too difficult.) One thing to remember is that when you add a content type, you will want to revisit this area to enable it in Localizer.
   
   
   Within Content settings, you may want to enable Activate content language fallback support. What this does is allow a "backup" translation to be displayed if there is no translation for the current language being viewed. For example, you may have a site with Italian, Japanese and English. If you are viewing the site in Italian, but a particular piece of content is only available in English, by enabling this and setting weights appropriately, the English content will appear. (If fallback is not enabled, content will only appear in the language being viewed, and not appear at all if the corresponding translation is not available.) If you select this option, you are also able to select the "priority" of fallback languages to be displayed with the typical (if not hard-for-many-to-understand) Drupal weighting scheme. The languages assigned "lighter" (smaller numbers) will have priority over "heavier" (larger numbers) on. So, for our example of the Italian, Japanese and English site, let's assume that Italian was set to 1, Japanese to 2, and English to 3. If I am viewing in Italian, but the content was only available in Japanese and English, the Japanese content would display as the fallback because it's priority is higher ("lighter") than English.





5. Under Support for external modules, enable the Searches return results in all languages if you want searches to return results regardless of language.

   The Views global support option allows Localizer to work with Views and can be enabled without issue regardless of whether you have installed Views or not.