# Help with Extension **URL:** \ **Category:** Radiant CMS\ **Created:** [October 30, 2007, 6:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/help-with-extension/118766 "2007-10-30T18:58:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mohits](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/bbe5ce/32.png) [@mohits](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mohits)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 6:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/help-with-extension/118766/1 "2007-10-30T18:58:47Z")
Hi everyone, Apologies that this is a long post. A while back, I had spoken about my idea for a simple language bar. _Background_ For a site I’m building, there are a number of technical articles. Some (not all) of these have been translated into other languages (not all languages). So, what I wanted to achieve was to have a simple language bar that included links to translations of the _same_ article with minimal effort. _Current Solution_ I have come around to the idea that the whole site should be organized with each language site being put under the root. So, under the home page, there is “en” for English, “jp” for Japanese and so on. Each language site is set up as having the exact same structure. I require the slug for the page to be the same for translated articles. So, ‘intro\_to\_radiant’ would be the slug even if the exact URLs are: → [example.com/en/tech/intro\_to\_radiant](http://example.com/en/tech/intro_to_radiant) → [example.com/jp/tech/intro\_to\_radiant](http://example.com/jp/tech/intro_to_radiant) → [example.com/kr/tech/intro\_to\_radiant](http://example.com/kr/tech/intro_to_radiant) Now, I’ve created a couple of tags that render the language bar by iterating through the languages and changing the language base in the URL. If find\_by\_url finds the language article, a link is rendered to it. Further, this is in a snippet and can be rendered quite neatly with minimal effort. _Problems_ OK, here’s the problem. Right now, I have 2 tags - one is something like \ and the other is \ – one iterates over each of the languages in the list and the other renders the link if it exists. [1] The problem is that my \ iterates over each of the languages without knowing if the translation exists. On the other hand, the \ renders a link only if it exists. If I use a list to render the links to the translations, it shows one bullet for each iteration of the lang\_each. I don’t know what to do. [2] The other way would be to iterate over the possible languages in the link tag itself (call it something else) and render the full language bar. This affects how I can style it (things like separators, etc.) Any ideas what I can do? Cheers, Mohit. 10/31/2007 | 1:57 AM. ---
**Author:** ![mohits](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/bbe5ce/32.png) [@mohits](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mohits)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2007, 7:24pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/help-with-extension/118766/2 "2007-10-30T19:24:33Z")
Hello again. Wisdom comes minutes after you click on ‘Send’ asking for help. Silly me! What I needed to do was learn how to write a \ tag. It’s been a good day. I’ve learnt how to: - write an iterator tag \ - write a conditional tag \ - find the URL of the current page in an extension And this is what the final snippet now looks like (gee, I like the 3Rs - Radiant, Radius, Ruby): This page is available in: \ \ - \\ \ I know that the names of the tags need to be changed. If anyone is interested in these tags, just get in touch. Cheers, Mohit. 10/31/2007 | 2:22 AM. ---
**Author:** ![mohits](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/bbe5ce/32.png) [@mohits](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mohits)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2007, 8:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/help-with-extension/118766/3 "2007-10-31T20:08:02Z")
Just to complete this thread, here are a couple of examples of the simple language bar on a site that’s under trial and design right now. This shows links to 2 translations that exist: > [http://tec.onghu.com/en/news/t-news-tron-show-2008/](http://tec.onghu.com/en/news/t-news-tron-show-2008/) This shows links only to the article itself because there isn’t any other translation: > [http://tec.onghu.com/cn/articles/ims\_reference/](http://tec.onghu.com/cn/articles/ims_reference/) All this is rendered automatically through a snippet that’s part of the layout and is based on the convention I’d described earlier. At this point, I’d also like to express a word of thanks for the person/ people who created the copy\_move extension. Getting the content aligned like this would have been extremely tenuous if I had to do it myself! Cheers, Mohit. 11/1/2007 | 3:02 AM.