Is there multilingual support for the site information settings? That's always the first thing, visitors are presented with and if it is not possible to present it in different languages, it is bad.

I am not a PHP programmer, I only need to configure a drupal site! And I don't want to become a PHP programmer either, so don't reply with PHP code snippets, please.

Comments

pepe roni’s picture

pepe roni commented
Category: support » feature

I found documentation at http://drupal.org/node/134002 and changed my settings.php accordingly.

Here are my (bad) experiences:

I have activated three languages: English, German and Latvian and set English as default, all with path prefixes en, de, lv. When changing the English site information texts all languages were changed, when changing Latvian texts, only Latvian was changed. Then I changed the German texts and English was also changed. What a hassle!
I then switched my default language to German and changed the German text again. All languages were changed, shit! Then I switched the default language to Latvian and changed the Latvian text: hurray, only the Latvian text was changed! Then I switched the default language back to English and changed the English text. Only the English text was changed! Then I switched the default language to German and changed the German text. Thanks God, only the German text was changed.

The above story is a mind protocol. I do not guarantee for the correct sequences of actions. I only want to explain, how difficult it is to set up a real multilingual site. I would have expected that all variables that are used on the interface are automatically multilingual. Also it is difficult to explain, when can a string be translated through the built-in translation function (locale) and when do you have to do the "trick" with the settings file. Of course, strings that are not changeable by input fields (messages and so on), can only be translated using the translation function (locale), but some strings are translated by importing a .po file (e.g. node names). That can be improved by:

My wishlist

  • Tag each translatable variable on the interface with a translate icon (possibly following the input field)
  • When you click on this icon, the field is repeated for each activated language and an icon is appended to each field indicating the language
  • Forget about the modification of settings.php!

If the language icon module is absent, or there is no icon for the language, use the language chars (en, de, lv and so on) instead.

rvarkonyi’s picture

rvarkonyi commented

Hi!

I'm sort of struggling with the same problems...

Have you been able to change the site name when switching to a different language?

I'm using D6 by the way and I can see that the handbook page was written for D5, but the "This is a multilingual variable." appears on the right places so I think it should work.

Please let me know...

Thanks!

pepe roni’s picture

pepe roni commented

Yes, I was. That's what I wrote about. You have to play with the default language to achieve this. And try different approaches. It's not easy!

pasqualle’s picture

pasqualle
Location 🇭🇺 Budapest
commented
Title: Multilingual support for admin/settings/site-information? » Multilingual site-information
Version: 6.x-1.0-beta3 » 6.x-1.x-dev
Component: Miscellaneous » Experimental modules
Category: feature » bug

The site information are dynamic strings. Drupal does not have any good solution how to deal with such strings. The i18nstrings module is one possible solution, but the module is far from perfect.

Thanks for the bug report.

I think your feature request is just too much for now. The viable solution is to translate every dynamic string with the l10n_client, but it need some work (it does not work at all now)..

jose reyero’s picture

jose reyero commented
Category: bug » support
Status: Active » Fixed

Check out latest handbook updates, http://drupal.org/node/133977

Site information strings are variables, btw, see "Multilingual variables"

And please, open bug reports when you have *specific* issues, the 'nothing works' one is not helpful at all and I have a big module to maintain ;-)

Thanks

pasqualle’s picture

pasqualle
Location 🇭🇺 Budapest
commented
Category: support » bug
Status: Fixed » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

I have activated three languages: English, German and Latvian and set English as default, all with path prefixes en, de, lv. When changing the English site information texts all languages were changed, when changing Latvian texts, only Latvian was changed. Then I changed the German texts and English was also changed.

I think this is a bug report, but if someone could confirm (reproduce) it, that would be helpful..

jose reyero’s picture

jose reyero commented
Status: Postponed (maintainer needs more info) » Closed (fixed)

@druppi
If you change the site's default language that's exactly what you can expect to happen.

@Pasqualle

You tell me you are reopening this, with no version information, and you can't even reproduce it??

If you have a bug, you file a bug report, but really I cannot dig into the threads to find where the bug is, for something that started as a support request, then changed into a feature request, then....

Now if someone can find the bug (in the latest version, beta4) feel free to *open a new issue* in a *new thread* as a *proper bug report*

Thanks.

pasqualle’s picture

pasqualle
Location 🇭🇺 Budapest
commented

it is quite common (at least for me) that a bug report starts as a support request.
i did not try to reproduce the bug, but the described steps seems evidently a bug to me..

1. English as default
2. changing the English site information texts all languages were changed <- ok
3. changing Latvian texts, only Latvian was changed <-ok
4. changed the German texts and English was also changed <- this is a bug (as I understand, this should not happen)
----

ok. tested. there is no bug, it only seems like a bug but it is not. These steps can't be reproduced.
It sometimes feels like there is something wrong till the variable is not set for all languages in the i18n_variable table..

---
other thing:

If you change the site's default language that's exactly what you can expect to happen.

that's not true. multilingual variables has nothing to do with the default language. The correct language code is stored in i18n_variables table so it does not depend on which language is the default.

the problem is with the English path prefix. It is empty as default. If you change the default language to something else, you can't access admin/settings/site-information in English. That is the problem. (you think you switched to English but you did not)
You need to fill the path prefix on page admin/settings/language/edit/en and everything works correctly..

pepe roni’s picture

pepe roni commented

I must admit, reading the handbook is very useful :(

If you change the site's default language that's exactly what you can expect to happen.

And that's the only way to translate the site information. Changing the current language has no effect.

So follow these steps:

  1. activate/define the languages you need
  2. set the default language of the site to the first language
  3. enter the site information
  4. set the default language of the site to the next language
  5. enter the site information

and so on...

And don't take care of the currently displayed language, this might not be the default language of the site.[edit]And, don't forget to change the currently displayed language to the default language, otherwise you will mess up your site information data![/edit]

If you now object, this is not user friendly design, I do agree! But it is working. And you do it only once for a site. The user interfaces regarding translations in drupal (core or in i18 module) will anyway never win the price for best usability at all.

pasqualle’s picture

pasqualle
Location 🇭🇺 Budapest
commented

I don't think you need to change the default language.
I tested with a simple language change, and did not find any problems..

pepe roni’s picture

pepe roni commented

Oh, you are the one who managed to bypass the translation rules in http://drupal.org/node/313272. How did you do it?

pasqualle’s picture

pasqualle
Location 🇭🇺 Budapest
commented

I don't understand which translation rule you are talking about. I did not find anything in that document about changing the default language..