By kteodor on

I know how to setup a bilingual/multilingual website in Drupal, but what I need to know is how can I have (share?) the same comments on a translated article with the original article, and vice versa? Basically, I want to have the same comments on the original and the translated version of an article... Is it a way to achieve this? Any answer is much appreciated. Thanks!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x, Drupal 6.x

Comments

maastrix’s picture

maastrix commented

I was just looking for that.. subscribing..

tttt’s picture

tttt commented

Did you or anyone else find a solution to this?

kteodor’s picture

kteodor commented

No, I didn't find a solution, but I also stopped searching... :(
But still would be useful to find one.

dddave’s picture

dddave commented

big bump

dddave’s picture

dddave commented

I still cannot believe that that wouldn't be possible but it really seems so. Does anyone knows if this is tackled in D7?

fuchsma’s picture

fuchsma commented

Still no possible solution for this ? How is this done in other blog mechanism ? Is it possible to create a special module for this ?

thekayra’s picture

thekayra commented

You might want to take a look at Node comments module (http://drupal.org/project/nodecomment).

For multilingual purposes stick to the 6.x-1.2-rc2 version as the beta version does not supoort it.

Narretz’s picture

Narretz commented

I 've also been looking for a solution to this issue. Thanks for pointing to node comments. Do you have any further hints on how node comments could help with the problem on commenting mulit-language sites? I am a beginner in Drupal and I am not really sure how to use node comments in this respect. I thought of using views to display all comment nodes on both the original and the translated node, but I don't think it is possible.
I don't want you to fully lay out a solution here, but since you know node comments the best, I thought you could point in a more specific direction.

Thanks

Narretz’s picture

Narretz commented

Hello,

I think I found a solution, or at least made the first step in the right direction. I used the modules nodecomments (6.x-1.2-rc2), and of course views and i18n on a fresh drupal 6.15 installation. Through educated guessing (the joining of mysql tables is just too hard to understand for me) I used a number of Views Relationships to display the comments of the original node together with those of the translation and vice versa. nodecomments.module uses views out of the box to display the comments, so I at least knew where to start. And here comes the magic:

Relationships:

  1. Node Comments: Original Parent Nid
  2. (Node) Node translation: Source translation
  3. (Source translation) Node translation: Translations

Arguments
(Translations) Node: Nid

And the MYSQL Query is also quite difficult (even though you don't need to understand it to use it):

SELECT node.nid AS nid
 FROM node node 
 LEFT JOIN node_comments node_comments ON node.nid = node_comments.cid
 LEFT JOIN node node_node_comments ON node_comments.nid = node_node_comments.nid
 LEFT JOIN node node_node ON node_node_comments.tnid = node_node.nid
 LEFT JOIN node node_node_1 ON node_node.nid = node_node_1.tnid
 WHERE (node.status <> 0) AND (node_node_1.nid = 3)

I have to admit that I don't know exactly what I have done here ... so if somebody spots a mistake or an oddity, please let me know.

There are probably still some issues to resolve. 4 come to my mind, I hope the number doesn't increase with time ;):

  1. You cannot use this solution on a website that already uses the core comment module, as it is incompatible with nodecomments
  2. On the default node teaser, only the number of comments for the respective node is shown. This is of course bound to happen and can likely be resolved through changing the teaser and maybe the use of another view (suggestions welcome)
  3. If you only have the original node and no translation, no comments will show up, even on the original, because the view cannot process without a tnid. You can solve this by creating a unpublished dummy translation. However, if you have "mixed language" as content control, on the front page, the node teaser for the fallback language is not shown. You can resolve this with the active translation.module (and create a dummy translation for every node with i18n auto translate, formerly known as auto draft.
  4. I have only tested this with flat nodecomment view. Threaded nodecomment view will probably work too, but don't take my word for it

Thx to thekayra for the hint with nodecomments. Even though this solution is not "sharing" comments on the database level, it works for the user, who isn't likely to see what is happening behind the scenes. I tested it with three languages, so no problems there.

simon_s’s picture

simon_s commented

@Narretz

Thanks a lot for your solution, you just saved my life! :)

leo981’s picture

leo981 commented

I too had a number of issues regarding multilingual websites I would like to thank Narretz for his informative post. It saved me a lot of Research time!