[Zope-CMF] Multilingual site with CMF/Plone?

[Greg Ward]

On 10 February 2003, Erik Lange said:
> If you just want the look of Plone, you can use MMM-skin, from 
> www.mmmanager.org

...which leads naturally to a question that has been brewing in my head
for a few days now: just what *does* Plone buy you that CMF doesn't
already supply?  Obviously the default skin is a lot sexier.  And I
gather that Plone's own UI is already multilingual, while CMF is not
(?).  Anything else?

The requirements for the site I'm working on are fairly basic:

  * two types of content: documents and links

  * documents consist of title, description, body text, "teaser" image,
    and "real" image.  The title/description/body text all need to
    be bilingual.  The "teaser" image for document X/Y is shown on
    the home page when X/Y is the most recently changed document
    in folder X; the "real" image shows up in the document itself.

  * links consist of title, description (both bilingual), teaser image,
    and URL.

  * and of course, there will be a few content managers with
    responsibility for the site content.  I think the size of the
    site is fairly modest: a few dozen, maybe a hundred documents or
    links.

Is there any good reason to use Plone for this site, apart from the
spiffy-looking UI to impress the client?    

> Basicly there are two ways of doing multilingual content:
> 
> 1. Create seperate objects for each language
> 
> 2. Let the content-object hold the various language-versions.
> 
> The first is of course the easiest way of doing it, and works fine - we're 
> having an internal battle at the moment, whether tis is the right way (TM) 
> of doing it...

I've had a strong hunch from the beginning that I need to create a new
content type for this project, so I haven't really considered option
#1.  #2 just seems so much cleaner for so many reasons.

> The second means, that when people are loking at a pice of content, and 
> changes the language, the content-piece they're looking at, will also 
> change to the correct langauge... The problem with this aproach is, what do 
> you do, if you need the retract a piece of content, to edit the content in 
> one of it's languages ? If you only need to edit the content in one 
> language-version, it's not so   clever that you need to retract all 
> language versions for editing...

But on the other hand, if you want to completely retract a document, you
want to get all of its translations at the same time.  Hmmm, I'm
starting to appreciate the problem a bit more... thanks!

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward <gward@python.net>                         http://www.gerg.ca/
What do you call a fish with no eyes?
A fsh.