I've got a nice little site running which I rather like. All's running
tickety boo (the site is English language). It has a rudimentary CMS
with it, basically I have a page model such that Page.name and Page.body
exist. I simply allow the user to enter the page name and body and I
throw the content onto various pages around the site. As I say works
well.
Next feature - I'd like to do the site in French, German and Spanish as
well.
So.. my plan is this...
Just update the page model to include Page.name Page.body AND
Page.bodyFrench, Page.bodyGerman, Page.bodySpanish.
I'd then update my admin views to show text areas for all the new
languages and allow the user to update them all, that'd work fine I
think.
How do I implement this though from a browser perspective?
I'd like to put a challenge on the front page of the asking for which
language the user wants the site. Maybe flags int he time honoured sense
or whatever.
Thing is though, How do I store this information so that my app knows
which page to display for this user. I;ve heard of Sessions? but haven't
used them yet, is that how to do it, any tips or code fragment to get me
started would be grately apprecaited. wer wer
Just update the page model to include Page.name Page.body AND
Page.bodyFrench, Page.bodyGerman, Page.bodySpanish.
I think most people who've done something like this would agree that
it's preferable to add a 'language' or 'locale' field to the DB, and keep a
single Page.body column.
I'd like to put a challenge on the front page of the asking for which
language the user wants the site. Maybe flags int he time honoured sense
or whatever.
No, not flags -- what flag would you use for English? Spanish?
What language would you be referring to with the Swiss flag?
There isn't remotely a mapping of languages <--> countries. Use
the language name directly.
Thing is though, How do I store this information so that my app knows
which page to display for this user. I;ve heard of Sessions? but haven't
used them yet, is that how to do it, any tips or code fragment to get me
started would be grately apprecaited. wer wer
Yes, you would want to store the user preference in the session. I'm
sure a quick google on "rails session" will turn up lots of examples.
And of course reading the ActionController::SessionManagement
doc is a good idea
If you're going to have mulitple languages for a page then you'd best
do a little bit of database normalisation otherwise you'll end up with
pageBodyFrench, pageBodyItalian, pageBodyGreek, pageBodySwahili etc
Then you have a many to many model PageLanguageBodyText
language_id
page_id
body_text
Then
Class Language << ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :page_language_body_texts
has_and_belongs_to_many :pages, :through=>:page_language_body_text
end
Class Page << ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :page_language_body_texts
has_and_belongs_to_many :languages, :through=>:page_language_body_text
end
If the linking table had only the foreign keys required for joining
the other two tables then there would be no need for a model, you'd
just create the migration. But in this case you do have extra
information so you have to have a model to access that information
hence
Class PageLanguageBodyText << ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :page
belongs_to :language
end
You'd need to tidy up the names a bit.
You'd then have to modify your CMS to allow you to edit the page body
text inside the form for your page, even though it's now been split
out to its own model.
You might want to have a look at the data model we use in zena (http://
zenadmin.org/en/documentation/list333.html), the translated texts are
stored in the "versions" table. The table also stores current
publications along with redactions and old texts.
We do not store language preferences in a session but use a prefix on
urls "/en/..." or "/fr/..." so that cached content is served correctly
for each language choice.
from a browsers perspective you'Re better off not showing a page where
people pick the language... they made that decision a while ago when
they bought their machine, OS and webbrowser.
what you want to do it use the HTTP Headers you can get which language
the users perfer to have their content in.... in case of doubt present
a default version in the language you want to serve by default and let
them change language easily (that's called content negociation).
