[Theforum] Re: langs

Michele Foster michele at wordpro.on.ca
Mon Nov 12 22:51:07 CST 2001


My two cents on the topic...  :)


----- Original Message -----
From: ".jeff" <jeff at members.evolt.org>


| aardvark,
|
| ><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
| > From: aardvark
| >
| > not to mention, do we even think the CMS can handle
| > multi-languages?
| ><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
|
| this is something i can speak about.  as it is right now, the cms cannot
| handle languages that require a different charset.  however, that aspect
| would be fairly easy to add.  there are provisions for marking an article
as
| being in a particular language (ie, there's a languageid column in the
| content table).  that bit of information has just never been used or
| expanded.


If I understand correctly, the above would be minimal amount of effort
required, to proceed??


i think if we're going to consider a change like this though, we
| should think about how the user's experience will be impacted by how we
| implement it.

I agree 100% with this ...


|
| imho, our data structure isn't built to appropriately handle
multi-language
| (ie, an article that's been translated into several languages) articles.

Yup, can see that .. based on previous discussions in the past.  Remember
when we were talking about the linking related articles feature, could this
be done in a similar manner?

| done right, the contentid should be the same for all language versions of
| the same article.  this makes it much easier to make the user aware of
| different language versions.  it also makes it much easier for us to pick
| the language version of the article to show the user by default based on
| their language preferences in their user settings (as of yet to be
| implemented so don't bother looking for it).

Good points.

in order for different
| language versions of the same article to share the contentid, we'd need a
| child table to hold the language specific content.

Ok, I understand this sort of.  Why must the different language versions
hold the same article contentID ?  And not just use the same procedure we're
been discussing for "related articles" ?  Would that work, just as well?

I'm curious to know what the estimated time of completion would be if we
wanted to implement the entire shebang.

Then, I'd like to make an informed decision, based on ETA for the project
and rate that against the options that have been presented.  I'm leaning
very muct towards Matt's idea, that only if the article is also in English;
however, I see Isaac's and others ideas that there could be some community,
world-wide benefit to allowing support for other articles.

IOW, what's it going to cost us to implement.  Do we really want to spend
the time doing this?  Do we have other projects more pressing that we should
continue to work on.  We'd need to define a list of article reviewers
on-hand, for other languages.

| just so everyone knows, i'm not just talking out of my ass on this.  i've
| built a site with requirements like this in the recent past including
| designing the supporting database architecture, coldfusion architecture,
| etc.

This is good Jeff .. so, what kind of time/effort would we be looking at to
implement something like this?  I realize it will be generalized, as not all
the final details have been worked out.


Thanks,

Michele






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