Evaluating ezPublish; have some questions

Tuesday 27 January 2004 1:37:59 pm

Question 2) See http://www.ez.no/community/forum/developer/multilingual_site_images

Tuesday 27 January 2004 3:25:30 pm

Hi,

We have developed a fully two-language site with EZP 3, my understanding is that you can have what you want with EZP 3

Frst : The siteaccess lets you use a default translation for each part of your site, so you don't have to bother with coding template logic for this

In our case we had three types of elements to translate to:

1) Content
2) Hard Coded Text in the templates
3) Images or media that shows text information, like a site menu made from images instead of text

1) For the first type we used the Translation in the EZP Admin
2) For the second type we used the i18n() template operator
3) For the third type we overrided de images subdirectory of our main language design directory
something like this :
design/spanish {*main language*}
design/spanish/images

So if you want to use different images for you english version then you creates:
design/english {*second language*}
design/english/images

Then go to your settings/siteaccess/spanish/site.ini.append and set:
[DesignSettings]
SiteDesign=spanish
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]=

and, go to your settings/siteaccess/english/site.ini.append and set:
[DesignSettings]
SiteDesign=english
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]=spanish
-------------------------------------
The last line of code above do the trick, simply using the override settings of EZP, it means that while in the english siteaccess (your second language here) EZP will look for any template not included in design/english at design/spanish

As the templates includes content fetched from DB, and text hardcoded that will be translated automatically by i18n operator they are "truly" multilanguage, so you don't need to duplicate it, at least that you want to change the layout of them according to the language

Last, dont forget to set the following settings of each siteaccess accordingly
From our site that is English and Portuguese, the portuguese siteaccess (the second one) read as :
...
[ContentSettings]
ViewCaching=enabled
TranslationList=por-PT;eng-GB

[RegionalSettings]
Locale=por-PT
ContentObjectLocale=por-PT
TextTranslation=enabled
TranslationCache=enabled
...

Hope this help

Lazaro
http://www.mzbusiness.com

Wednesday 28 January 2004 4:31:13 pm

Hi Luis,

Again, you can achive #2 using EZP 3, To do what you want at number 2, we use the template operator i18n(), as stated in the thread you mentioned above this operator uses the current language of ezpublish, this is is set at your siteaccess site.ini.append file, here I will try to give you an step by step guide to got it

Premises :
If you installed EZP 3 using the normal installation (using the wizard) and tell the installer that you will use two languages, for example English and Portuguese, and the name of your user side site is 'en' (short for English), then at the end of installation you got the file

settings/siteaccess/en/site.ini.append that should included something like this :

[ContentSettings]
TranslationList=eng-GB;por-PT

To create a truly bi-lingual (or multilingual) site you will have to create a siteaccess for each additional language that you need

Here the steps to setup a second language in your web site, this is based on our site, so we will use portuguese language to demo

1) Create a new directory under settings/siteaccess, we called 'pt'
2) Copy every file under settings/siteaccess/en/ to settings/siteaccess/pt/
3) Check ownershihp, dir and file permissions on and under 'pt', they should match it on and under 'en'
4) Create a new directory pt under design (you should already have and 'en' directory under design created by ezp installer)
5) Create a directory for overriding images used in the portuguese site, you should already have a design/en/images directory so create a design/pt/images
6) Check in 4 and 5 (step 3)
7) Edit your site.ini.append under pt, changing the following lines:

[SiteSettings]
SiteURL=my.domain/index.php/en

[DesignSettings]
SiteDesign=en
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]=

[RegionalSettings]
Locale=eng-GB
ContentObjectLocale=eng-GB

to:

[SiteSettings]
SiteURL=my.domain/index.php/pt

[DesignSettings]
SiteDesign=pt
AdditionalSiteDesignList[]=uk

[RegionalSettings]
Locale=por-PT
ContentObjectLocale=por-PT

8) Edit your general override settings file at settings/override/site.ini.append
[SiteSettings]

DefaultAccess=en

SiteList[]
siteList[]=en
SiteList[]=pt

[SiteAccessSettings]

AvailableSiteAccessList[]
AvailableSiteAccessList[]=en
AvailableSiteAccessList[]=pt
AvailableSiteAccessList[]=admin

SiteAccessList[]
siteAccessList[]=en
SiteAccessList[]=pt
SiteAccessList[]=admin

9) Clean all EZP caches

Now you have setup the basis for a truly bi-lingual (or multilingual) site

Check it, opening your main and secondary SiteUrl in you browser, you can translated some content, or use the i18n() operator in your template for some hard coded text

The principle is that for opening the SiteURL: my.domain/index.php/pt, EZP will use the templates and images in design/pt if available, else they will use the desing/en templates and images, as design/pt is already empty (no .tpl file and no image files) it actually uses your design/en templates and image, until you add images and templates to the design/pt dir

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Regarding the i18n() operator, it will use the .ts file for the language of your siteaccess (defined in your site.ini.append see 'RegionalSettings' at step #7 ), I think is that simple
if it doesn't find the translation string, it will default to the hard code text, normally it is the text in Eng-GB, because EZP uses Eng-GB as its default language
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To add translations you should use the translation system, the translation system, have a command line tool that goes through your web site .tpl files adding every i18n() hard code text to its database ( the .ts file ), (all of them are stored as Eng-GB text), after that you run its editor (a GUI application) that helps you adding your translations for every term added before, finally the editor will save your .ts file, this is the one you should copy to your web site at share/translations/your_language/translation.ts

More information on this at: http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/translations

Luis, I'm sorry if I have missed something about the .ts translation, I'm not in charge for this in my team, so I'm learning also :-)

OOPS, it seems like I'm writing a book on this, hope this help to get the job done, case not I will resign :-)

Lazaro
http://www.mzbusiness.com

Friday 30 January 2004 11:07:19 am

Hi,

Nice to hear you are getting there

Check your PHP version, PHP 4.2.x is reported as unstable by ezcrew, I think there are problems with php session handling in this version

You may also check if you are using template cache block in your troubled templates, they can have side effects you need to consider when designing your template, there are some interesting threads and doc, on using cache block properly search the forum

Remember that you don't need to create a .tpl file for each language, at least that you want to change the template layout, is all that you want is information translation you don't need it at all

Last, check your cache settings at every siteaccess site.ini.append

Cheers
Lazaro Ferreira

Lazaro
http://www.mzbusiness.com