[Plone-i18n] Multilingual support in Plone 3.0

[Maurits v. R. <m.v...@ze...>]

Hi,

I have been looking a bit at multilingual support in Plone 3.0 the
last few days.  There are some differences when compared to 2.5 that
not everyone may be aware of.  I thought I would just note those
changes here so more people now them.

- In 3.0 PloneLanguageTool is installed by default.  This is done via
  GenericSetup so there is no official way to uninstall it, should you
  want that.

- This means that in a default 3.0 install you will only have one
  language, usually English, but that depends on the language of the
  browser that you use to add that Plone Site.  In other words: when I
  install Plone with my browser, the complete UI is in Dutch.  I
  believe this is a major change compared to 2.5 where by default the
  Plone UI will get translated based on the language setting of the
  browser used by visitors.

  To repeat: in a default 3.0 install there is no multilingual support.

- In 3.0 you can still select more languages via the plone control
  panel of course, at the @@language-controlpanel page, so you can
  make it multilingual.  But you do not have the option to disable the
  display of flags.  Flags are always displayed.  This may be
  politically sensitive.  So you miss the option from 2.5 to display a
  drop down box with the language names.

  Actually, you can still do that in the ZMI if you want.
  See https://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/6918 for more info

  BTW, I see no flag for South Africa when I select the Afrikaans
  language.  I wonder if that was done on purpose precisely because
  that one may be politically sensitive.  No idea.  If you want it
  back, file a bug or fix it.

  Actually, I do not see flags at all now.  And there is no action to
  translate content.  I am very sure I did see that one or two days
  ago.  Did something drastically change here??  Wait, it *is* visible
  in a site that was initially made as English, but not in an initial
  Dutch site!  Very strange.  Can someone confirm this?

- The above is by design.  It was agreed that there is no sane way for
  a default Plone site to be really multilingual, so some options from
  2.5 were taken out or hidden.

- If you want more control over the multilingual handling, you should
  install LinguaPlone.  This may need a few more updates before it is
  ready for Plone 3.0, but I have not checked.  If someone is working
  on this and needs help or a tester, ping me.


I am not in the i18n core, so if I made mistakes here, please set them
straight so I can learn some more. :)

-- 
Maurits van Rees | http://maurits.vanrees.org/ [NL]
            Work | http://zestsoftware.nl/
"Do not worry about your difficulties in computers,
 I can assure you mine are still greater."