[dokuwiki] Re: Multilingual wiki

At 11:43 +0100 UTC, on 2007-01-27, Guy Brand wrote:

>   I'm working on adding multilingual support in DokuWiki. The goal is
>   to handle pages which are available in different languages. At this
>   stage I need your opinions on the way to handle a page variants i.e.
>   page and its translated sisters, and more precisely, where you store
>   these translated pages.

Wouldn't it be practical to follow Apache's convention of adding the 2-letter
code to the end of the file name?
page1.txt.en
page1.txt.de
page1.txt.fr

Personally I think this would make it easiest to manage multiple languages,
as this way you'd have all language versions of a page together in the same
directory and thus easier to move around (on file system level).

Btw, you'll then need a config option for defining a default language, which
ought to respect user-agents' Accept-Language HTTP header. In addition you'll
need to let users override that on a per per page (per session?) basis.

>   I don't think storing a french translated
>   variant of page.txt in the same namespace as page.txt but named
>   page.fr.txt or page.txt.fr is a good idea as it may need too many
>   changes and would certainly break some templates (I'm thinking of
>   those with sidebar pages for example) and plugins.

How much of a problem that is would depend on how many templates and plug-ins
would be affected, how popular they are, and how hard it would be to adjust
them to this new situation. I agree that ideally you shouldn't break such
things, but if that means having to implement i18n as a hack instead of as a
thorough feature, it may be the better option after all.


Just my 2 cents


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>
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