how do you prepare i18n in your websites? I mean what do you do avoid the situation when you search for i18ned websites in Polish you get English description cause English is the default one.
Thanks in advance,
Etam.
I give every language version it's own URL. So English version of an article would be avialiable under http://example.com/en/my-article, and a version in Polish under http://example.com/pl/my-article (or if you really care about SEO even under http://example.com/pl/moj-artykul).
Had I given all version the same URL (and switched content dynamically) Google would have indexed only one version, and users couldn't find the article using keywords from any other language. I also think having distinct URLs people can link to for every version is more user friendly.
Related
The point of this is to keep notes/urls pointing to particular parts of the documentation that people want to refer to in the future. For example, when something is a complex feature that requires a little bit of review most of the times you work with it.
Let's take an example. I search for Django STATICFILES_DIR:
https://www.google.com/search?q=django+STATICFILES_DIRS
Pretty quickly I get exactly what I want:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.1/ref/contrib/staticfiles/
which has a STATICFILES_DIR configuration entry.
But, notice from the url, this is for Django 4.1. And it says so on the page too.
But maybe there are a current version? Let's look.
There isn't.
Contrast with Python, which points to a very generic, 3 version. Not to Python 3.10 or 3.11.
https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html#dictionaries
Or postgres (looking for create table):
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/14/sql-createtable.html
OK, yes, I have a version 14, but...
I can click on that current and that will NOT pin me to a particular version.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtable.html
In the case of Django, Python and Postgresql, I am pretty confident a generic, version-less documentation page will serve my purposes just fine 90% of the time - those are pretty stable APIs by now.
Often searching gets you to ancient postgresql versions like 9.2, but you can always find a current link.
Am I looking in the wrong places for a permanent link for Django docs?
Yes, there is dev link on the Django versions, but that's living a bit dangerously, I assume people are potentially working updating the docs on the current version on that URL. Or should I use that after all?
Going to use the dev tag for now. Django is stable enough that I expect minimal problems there and I can always go back to my version of interest from there. But at least I don't have bookmarks pointing to a bunch of different historical versions.
I have a website that I am translating into different languages. I have the content translated and stored in a database. I also wrote, into the php files, different mechanisms that will display the language based on a global define I set high in the code. I am happy with all of this. My question is how do I control this global define?
I currently have a javascript toggle that sets a cookie and then reloads the current page. And every subsequent page just reads that cookie to set the global define. It works very well, however I am running into two big problems. (1) I can't just can't have a url to send to somebody that has the language in it (I could do something like domain.com/forwarder.php?lan=spanish&gotopage=page.php that would set a cookie and then forward, but that's ugly). And (2), search engines can't view the multiple languages since they don't really use cookies and javascript.
So how do I solve this? Does anybody have experience in this? Can you share your experiences?
I'm leaning towards just using the url and dropping the cookie; that seems popular among various international sites I've seen. So I'm guessing the urls would be:
domain.com/page (for english, equivalent to domain.com/en/page)
domain.com/es/page (for spanish)
domain.com/fr/page (for french)
etc ......
Is this a good idea? I will have to go through my code and prepend all my href's with the language code, which might be a pain.
So does anybody have any comments on this? Is this a good plan? Am I neglecting to realize something?
It's been a long time, but can't you use the $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"] and set it automatically. And prior to writing the cookie for the first time, leave message on the screen in either english or another language in the array asking if this is the correct language, with a drop down of available languages? Once it is selected, store that as default website language.
You can use string constants in global resource files. Have only one website that calls those string constants based on the current language.
We have a small website which was developed with the default language ('en'), without paying mind to the language or versioning capabilities of sitecore (ouch!). We simply forgot to set the correct default language at the start of the project.
Now we have an entire content tree of 'en' items, when they should be 'nl-NL' (it's a Dutch site). And I am wondering if there is an easy way of changing the language for all items in that tree (that does not involve hacking).
I found this Q&A, but it just talks about setting the default language. I'd like to do that, yes, but I would also like to set the correct language for the existing item(versions).
thoughts?
From what I remember we had a similar problem before. Not with filling a website in the wrong language, but having empty content that should be filled with default english content after creating the new language. What we did was export the language. In your case you could export the English language, create a dutch language and replace all entries in the English XML file that comes out with nl-NL values.
After you've done that you could import the language file as the Dutch language and all items are filled.
To me this sounds as the easiest and quickest approach, since you only have to search and replace some xml tags.
Good luck!
You could write a .NET program that would go through your whole content tree and update language parameter of each item accordingly. Sitecore APIs give you access to almost everything you see in the backend (including content manipulation) so it shouldn't be much of a problem to automate this task.
As an anternative you could copy your whole content from one language to another and then remove the language you don't want. Here's how to do it.
I'll caveat that my experience with it is limited, but from what I've seen, the Sitecore Rocks plugin for Visual Studio might allow you to script this.
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/44a26c88-83a7-46f6-903c-5c59bcd3d35b
I have a Django site that uses the localization middleware in combination with gettext and the trans/blocktrans template tags to show visitors different pages depending on the preferred language in their user agent string (which seems to be the standard way of doing things in Django).
This works great for supported languages (currently only Spanish, English, and German with more coming). If I set the preferred language in my browser to a different language, I get the pages for that translation. However, I have no idea how it appears for search engines.
When a search engine crawls a site, does it typically have a preferred language in its agent string? Will German spiders get the German site and will Spanish ones get the Spanish site, or will they just get the default English site that's displayed when a user has no language set? Does this vary by search engines and is there a "standard way" of doing things that individual crawlers may or may not stick to?
bots typically do not have accept-language setting in the http header. which means that django will service your default language.
Regional search engines can have bots with accept-language set to whatever they prefer, but you cannot rely on that.
It is best to have different pages for each language. such as http://your.website.com/english/
and then in your middleware set up a redirect to the right language page if a specific accept-language is present.
Don't rely on what the search engine may do in this regard. You want all versions to be crawled. To achieve that:
Have different URLs for the different language versions.
Make sure the search engines can find the different versions.
Overall, I believe that the way I did it on my homepage is close to ideal in regard to both search engines and regular users:
When a user arrives at, e.g. brazzy.de/index.php, the site tries to determine the language from cookie (if present) or browser settings (Accept-language header), defaults to English, and does not redirect
Every page has links to the different language versions of that page (IMO the most important factor for user convenience, and also makes sure search engines can easily find the different versions).
These links lead to e.g. brazzy.de/en/index.php, which is in my case rewritten to brazzy.de/index.php?lang=en - this ensures that search engines see distinct URLs for the different language versions.
Visiting such a subdirectory sets the language cookie to that language
The pages without a language-specific URL (i.e. where the language depends on client data) use e.g. <link rel="canonical" href="/en/"> to tell the search engine at which language-specific URL that page can be found.
Use XML sitemaps to further make sure search engines can find all pages and all different language versions.
use hreflang meta tag but make sure you use different urls for different languages. even better, use different domain extension (example.de, example.es) in conjunction with Django sites framework.
First, some background information... I'm coming up on a medium-scale website for a non-profit that will require both English and Korean translations. Feature-set includes: CMS for normal content, a blog, some form submission/handling (including CSV/PDF exports), a job posting board, a directory of related businesses and non-profits (that accepts visitor submissions), and a basic (probably blog-driven) newsroom.
I have a fairly strong development background, and I've done some sites using Drupal, built some basic custom CMSes using frameworks like CodeIgniter, and I've recently started getting into Django. These are the primary options that I am exploring, and I would consider using different tools for different portions of the project, but what I'm mainly interested in, is if anyone has any experience to share with regards to localization/internationalization. I haven't yet put together a site that supports multiple languages, so before I get in trouble by underestimating the task, or making poor assumptions, I'd like to get some input to help guide my decision-making process.
Do you have any recommendations for frameworks (Drupal, Django, CodeIgniter) that handle localization/internationalization/translation well for a CMS? I know they all support it, but I'm looking for real-world experience here (or suggestions for modules/plugins given explanations).
Sorry for the longwinded question, but I wanted to be clear as possible. Thanks in advance!
There is a distinction between "site" translation and content translation. Django handles the site translation great, out of the box. The content translation, however, requires making some decisions (there's no one right way at this point). This probably makes sense, because of the very nature of Django as a lower level framework (when compared to something like Drupal, which is intended to serve as a complete CMS).
There are applications for Django which are meant to add this functionality (in the form of translations configured at the model level):
Django-multilingual
Transmeta
Also, I found this question that is related.
The bottom line though, is that this is still being explored in the Django world, and neither approach has been decided upon for the framework. Also, although I haven't used it, Drupal has module support for this in the form of the i18n module.
I will update with more conclusions as I come to them. If you have anything to add about content translation in Django or in Drupal, feel free to add your own answer as well.
You probably already know that the native i18n support in django is quite good. As for translation, you might try the django-rosetta app which allows you to grant translation rights to a subset of users, who are then able to translate through an admin-like interface.
Zend_Translate is pretty comprehensive. And if you decide to use PHP, I suggest you take a look at it. It provides multiple interfaces (e.g. an Array, CSV, Gettext, etc.) to manage your translations, which makes it IMHO unmatched when it comes to PHP.
I'm not sure how well it plays with Drupal, since Drupal is hardly a framework but more a CMS -- or maybe a CMS framework. I'm pretty sure that Drupal either has a thing build in or that there is a plugin for it.
With CodeIgniter you would start from scratch and Zend_Translate plays well with it.
I liked Drupal over Joomla. You should also look into DotNetNuke, out of the box it has lot of things that will meet your needs.
Checkout django-blocks. Has multi-language Menu, Flatpages and even has a simple Shopping Cart!!