[Phpslash-devel] Re: [minor annoyance in new release

[Luis M <le...@ho...>]

<snip>
>On Mon, Mar 03, 2003 at 10:09:01AM -0500, Luis M wrote:
> >
> > I found this to be a little annoyance which might or might not be a bug. 
>The
> > templates under $PATH/templates/en/ are only offer under the "skin" 
>block to
> > the browsers who have English languages (en). Thus if you, say, have a
> > $PATH/fr/skin1 directory for the french language (and the same for other
> > languages) only that skin is offer to french browsers.
>
>Yes, I think I follow this now.  This is one reason you don't want to
>cache the skin block.  Another is you get links to articles, etc.
>
>This is the designed behavior.
>

good to know. I noticed the same kind of behaviour for the "Votes" block. If 
a user in a different language goes to the site, and happens to go after the 
cache for this block has time out, then the next time I go with a different 
language I see the block in whatever the last language it was cache. To 
avoid this, I set the cache to 0 -- I remember that setting a block's cache 
to 0 used to cause problems in earlier versions of phpSlash. In any case, 
setting this to zero helps, but doesn't solve the problem ... more on this 
later on...

> > Since the text for the whole site gets translated regardless of the skin
> > being used, I think it would make more sense to offer all templates from 
>a
> > given directory (or have a folder which is the default language for all
> > other -- I think this is what "en" is).
>
>Uh, some templates contain text that is not translated - the submission
>form, login form, poll results, etc.

True. But, eventually they will be able to translate from the "gettext"-like 
functions phpSlash uses, right? In any case, only a few strings are left 
out.

>
> > Either that or users will have to
> > create a directory in e/a directory for the language they want to 
>support
> > and put a "skin.ini" file whose skin.parent is the default language for 
>the
> > given site.
>
>Yes.  Except you can't refer back to the default language's skin
>(yet, maybe?) in the skin.ini.
>

yes you can :-) it's tricky thought. You have to use 
"skin.parent=../../en/basic"; but it works. I'm doing this now. I hope that 
it's not possible to pass something like this in the actual URL. If not 
users will be doing things like "skin=../../../../../../../../etc/passwd" 
and who knows what can happen. I have not tried to break the installation by 
doing all illegal things I can think of, but I will very soon. I will report 
whatever I find.

> > I know that modifying the algorithm for the "skin" blocktype could 
>easily
> > yield to recurring thru a list of duplicated directories, so a solution
> > should involved default-ing to just one directory and not to all other
> > languages to look for template directories that are not present in the
> > current language... (confusing uh, just read this paragraph again...).
> >
> > I hope that this makes sense to you guys out there (Joe?).
> >
>
>I think I understood after reading it a few times :)
>
>Setting the skin using the user accounts and preferences hopefully will
>be the preferred method to choose skins.  However, I have done no testing
>on what skins are available after a language change.
>I think this might be broken.
>

I knew it was confusing to write it, so it had to be worse to understand it.
I have not tried to register a "normal" user account and changing the users' 
preferences. Will users be able to see all skins regardless of language 
settings and the directories used to placed the skins?
i.e. skins in $templates/en $templates/fr $templates/lang will all show as 
options to the users?
Let me play with the site a bit so that I can get a better sense of these 
things. So far, I think that the best solution is to just put an empty 
directory in all the language directories with a skin.ini file pointing 
couple of directories backward to whatever the "basic" directory is for a 
given site.

peace out!


----)(-----
Luis Mondesi
System Administrator/Web developer
LatinoMixed.com

le...@ho...

"Black holes are where God divided by zero" - Steven Wright

Public signature: http://www.latinomixed.com/lems1/public-a.asc


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