Multilingual Site Setup Headaches

Tuesday 16 September 2003 10:38:07 am

Dear ezCommunity,
I have been working with ezpublish 3.1 for over a month now and have little results other than a headache due to difficulties with multilingual site configuration. I have been through the forums and documentation, trying to understand what others have said already. I systemitized all that into a howto for myself and my project team, but find that it is still not right (the site does not work as I want it). I hope someone can help me as I have already put in a lot of time and have not been able to do it.

I am trying to set up a site with Spanish as the principal language and with three language parts of the site (English, Spanish, Portuguese). I am using the siteaccess method to distinguish language configurations by the url used in the site. The admin area is presented fine in Spanish. Problem is seen in two places on the front end:
1. ALL the content is displayed in Spanish (on all three parts of the site).
2. The only thing that changes when switching between languages (also a problem) is the Content Object Name (which for example always says "New Folder" instead of "About Us" in the English part).

I cannot manage to resolve this and would really appreciate some insight on what is going wrong. Thanks in advance!!

This is what I have done:
A. Tell ezpublish how to figure out which language to display (by the uri method)
Idea is it have localhost/index.php/es/, localhost/index.php/en/, localhost/index.php/b/. Edit settings/override/site.ini.append to have:

[SiteAccessSettings]
MatchOrder=uri
URIMatchType=element
URIMatchElement=1
URIMatchRegexp=^/([^/]+)/
URIMatchRegexpItem=1
AvailableSiteAccessList[]=en
AvailableSiteAccessList[]=es
AvailableSiteAccessList[]=br
AvailableSiteAccessList[]=admin
DebugAccess=enabled

[RegionalSettings]
#Locale=esl-ES
#ContentObjectLocale=esl-ES
TextTranslation=enabled
TranslationCache=enabled

[ContentSettings]
TranslationList=eng-US;esl-ES;por-PT
ViewCaching=disabled

B. Create one siteaccess folder for every language.
settings/siteaccess/en (English)
settings/siteaccess/es (Spanish)
settings/siteaccess/br (Portuguese)
In each site.ini.append file, I put cooresponding configuration for that part of the site. For example, English part has:
[RegionalSettings]
Locale=eng-US
HTTPLocale=en
ContentObjectLocale=eng-US

Also, I commented out the Locale and ContentObjectLocale [Region settings] in site.ini.

C. Create content, try to retrieve it
I create content in the admin area in Spanish. The add translations and translate the content. I got to the front end and try to see the content:
localhost/index.php/es/content/view/full/2 great
localhost/index.php/en/content/view/full/2 content in Spanish still and Conent Object name is 'New Folder'; same with /br/ area

Please someone give me some help! I have cruised the forums for hours seeking solutions, checked bugs and the howtos. Still no change in the situation.

Thanks,
chris

Wednesday 17 September 2003 1:14:31 pm

Thanks for your suggestion. Actually, I was being a multilingual bonehead. When I created the site I made all my folders necessary. Then I returned and edited to add the translations. Even though I stored the translations, I failed to publish them. So ended up with all my translations attached to draft versions. (I am still pretty new to ezp and I only found the publish button by accident). So now multilingual is working. YEAH!!!

With the addition of a minor note about this, I now have a pretty complete howto about multilingual sites. Is anyone interested in revising or commenting on it? How should I go about sharing it with the ezp community?

Cheers,
chris

Thursday 18 September 2003 7:21:22 am

I started a howto for multilingual sites at http://ez.no/developer/ez_publish_3/documentation/configuration/configuration/language_and_charset/how_to_setup_a_multilingual_site

I would appreciate everyone's comments or help in putting together a systematized documentation. I am still trying to get it to look nice like the other documentation...

thanks,
chris