Internationalization examples

Ruby Apps Radiant CMS
1

I’m being hired to write a new Extension for handling some basic site
internationalization needs (admin text won’t be addressed).

We’ve went over a couple of options and for managability we’ve
decided on creating separate default page parts for each language and
then overriding find_page_by_url in our extension to select the right
content to render based upon the browser language type.

I talked with John and Sean both about this approach while at
RailsConf and they concurred that it would work fine, but it’s not
going to deliver the right pages with caching on. For the site I’m
helping on having caching off won’t be detrimental, but I probably
could also override some of the Radiant caching stuff within the
extension and have it also working.

John implemented Ruby Language site with internationalization using
multiple roots under the root (home/english, home/spanish, etc.) This
approach is cleaner in a couple of ways but is less manageable
(depending on your use case–if you have different editors for each
language it would be more manageable).

Has anybody already done a similar thing? Any other approaches worth
considering?

Does anybody wish to pitch-in on the effort? We will be releasing an
open sourced version of the resulting extension when I’m done with it
later this week.

Thanks,

Loren

2

approach is cleaner in a couple of ways but is less manageable
(depending on your use case–if you have different editors for each
language it would be more manageable).

Has anybody already done a similar thing? Any other approaches worth
considering?

I would suggest a combination of the two approaches.

Have a parent page that (virtually) partitions the site into sub-pages
based on langauges, and then grab out page parts based on language
extensions:

class LanguagePartitionPage < Page

def find_by_url(url, live = true, clean = true)
#set a language variable from the url here
end

def child_url(page)
clean_url(url + ‘/’ + @language + ‘/’ + child.slug)
end

end

class Page
def part(name)
parts.find_by_name(name + ‘_’ + language) ||
parts.find_by_name(name.to_s)
end
end

Deciding how and where to store the langauge var is left as an exercise
for the reader, but there’s a host of options (stick it in
the request params, a global var, probably other cleaner methods too).

Dan.