How to Globalize using variants of templates?

Rails Rails I18n
1

Hi,

We have a web application running on Ruby on Rails 1.0, with all RHTML
files stored in the standard app/views/controller directories. The
static content, messages, etc. in all the templates are in US English.
We hope to release the website in other languages.
We are considering the use of the Globalize plugin from
http://svn.globalize-rails.org/svn/globalize/globalize/trunk/
The layout of the pages is unlikely to change for most of the
languages. All we need to do is call the translate method for all
static content as:
“”.translate to get the text translated in the new language.

However, in case of some languages like Arabic, the entire layout of
all pages will have to be changed. The RHTMLs themselves will have to
be different. This may also be the case for some other languages for
which the static text does not align properly and we are forced to
create still more variants of the RHTMLs.

How do we make sure our application has a set of default templates
that are used if the corresponding localized templates are not
present?
Is there something we need to do in routes.rb?
How will Rails locate the template to be used for rendering?

Thanks,
Yash

2

Yash G. wrote:

However, in case of some languages like Arabic, the entire layout of
all pages will have to be changed. The RHTMLs themselves will have to
be different. This may also be the case for some other languages for
which the static text does not align properly and we are forced to
create still more variants of the RHTMLs.

Layouts could be switched depending on the Locale.language.direction
field. Usally its “ltr” and if it is “rtl” you could load a different
set of stylesheets using a before_filter in your ApplicationController.

How do we make sure our application has a set of default templates
that are used if the corresponding localized templates are not
present?
Is there something we need to do in routes.rb?
How will Rails locate the template to be used for rendering?

Globalize tries to find templates by the current set locale in that
format:
..rhtml If it does not find a file matching that
convention, then it just uses the .rhtml file.