fog@mixadlive.com (Federico Di Gregorio) wrote:

hi *,

we are starting to build two *big* (international) sites and we have the need to localize them from the start. i've looked up every product on the zope site and read the (only?) document about l10n available: the "Changing Contexts in Zope" text. i still don't see a clean and simple solution, so i am thinking about writing a product to help with localization. but i don't want to reinvent the wheel so here's what i am trying to do. (comments and pointers to documentation are welcome!)

** THE SIMPLIEST WAY **

create an L10N object able to render its contents accordingly to a global variable (e.g., a cookie.) you just set one property for every language (property name == language id) and you are done. i can also throw in some nice dtml to let the translators do their job inside zope in the properties tab, etc... the main problem here is exponential object growth. a complex page can easily need teens or hundreds of such objects.

** THE IMHO BEST WAY **

subclass the Folder object and add (i don't even know if that is possible, no documentation about it) a new kind of property, lets call it "L10NText." when the L10NFolder is asked for data, it returns the right translation, based on the same global variable as above. write some pretty complex dtml that lets you add L10NText, and, for every L10NText var, add translations. This approach keeps the number of objects low and all the translated text is some well-defined place.

what do you zope gurus think about it?

The ZI18N product in my Zope.org folder does something like this: http://www.zope.org/Members/tseaver/ZI18N I am CC'ing the Zope I18N Project mailing list (zip@eevolute.com) -- you probably want to subscribe there as well (http://www.eevolute.com/mailman/listinfo/zip). -- ========================================================= Tres Seaver tseaver@palladion.com 713-523-6582 Palladion Software http://www.palladion.com