Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Dynamic Translation (long)

[Eloi G. <el...@re...>]

Hi Ulf!

I spent a couple months trying to find a way to get the Article Manager 
module to work with the Language module.  While I came up with workable 
solutions, none of them were easy to use.  Like Matt noted, almost all 
of them generated so much extra db traffic that anything more than 
personal sites would have to be hosted on dedicated servers!

In hopes of writing an alternative Language mod, I researched what other 
apps were doing.  All of them had various flaws.  At the end I realized 
that other than subscribing to a dynamic language server like babelfish, 
content mirroring is the only workable, easy-to-use, easy-to-administer 
option. 

However, you don't need to set up separate sites.  Using 0.94's group 
restrictions (or even a language identifier picklist Matt?)  You can say 
that an item can be seen only by German group members.  That way there's 
no extra queries needed. 

 From there everything stays easy if you keep it simple.  There're no 
fallback languages or automatic features or centralized modules/data 
stores.  They always mess things up over a period of time, anyway.  The 
only change that a module would make to make things any easier is to 
include an additional field to be used as a "translation group 
identifier".  That way the module would know that everything with an 
identifier of "ll3ee" are translations of each other, but that should be 
used only for editing & administration purposes only -- not for display 
because it would create an additional load on the server.

Matt, I haven't looked at the 0.94 code yet -- is it possible for 
"special-use" groups to be created?  Meaning that you can check a box 
designating it as a language group without creating extra tables, 
queries & stuff?

-Eloi-


Ulf Hallmann wrote:

> hmm.
>
> would that mean that information-driven sites would have to stick on 
> the current version and remain un-updatable for good? Bummer. As I 
> said, I am running some sites like that. They work great -  am willing 
> to show you, but I dont want to post the links across the whole list.
>
> I am not sure if I am asking for so much. I understand the issue of 
> huge language tables, of un-translated comments and your strive for 
> perfection. Hoewer, perfection might not be what the business out 
> there is asking for. I for one need a reliable system that works and 
> that can handle more than one language.
>
> Running different sites for each language is not an option for me, as 
> it creates an admin overhead in most cases. Many sites are only 
> partially translated (ony the most important "core" information) - 
> distributing different languages across different sites would result 
> in incomplete content in some languages. Which leads to users getting 
> confused. Not to speak about having N systems to upgrade one a new 
> version of the framwork gets release, to apply N patches, N sets of 
> custom code and opening N times more potential security issues....
>
> For now, the current debate is IMHO more a political than a technical 
> issue (as solutions exist which might not be optimal but which are 
> sufficient for a lot of users). My fear is, once you go ahead and 
> apply the po technology, the lang module and some nice opportunities 
> that come with it vanish.
>
> I guess what I am trying to acomplish is to reduce the hassle you are 
> talking about - for me some improvements in the lang mod and in the 
> guidelines of it being supported by other mods would do the trick.
>
> Ulf
>
>
> Matthew McNaney wrote:
>
>>a lot.
>>
>>  
>>
> *_______________*