Products.LinguaPlone 2.1beta1

Introduction

LinguaPlone aims to be the multilingual/translation solution for Plone, and achieves this by being as transparent as possible and by minimizing the impact for existing applications and Plone itself.

It utilizes Archetypes references to do the translation, and all content is left intact both on install and uninstall - thus, it will not disrupt your content structure in any way. It also works with WebDAV and FTP.

LinguaPlone doesn’t require a particular hierarchy of content, and will work with any layout of your content space.

Dependencies

Requires the following minimum versions:

• Plone 3.0.2

• plone.browserlayer 1.0rc2

Installation

Before installing LinguaPlone you need to install plone.browserlayer in your Plone site. It shows up as ‘’Local browser layer support’’ in the Plone ‘’Add-on Products’ control panel.

Frequently asked questions

LinguaPlone - quick demo instructions

LinguaPlone ships with a few example types that demonstrates the translation mechanism. It’s trivial to add this to your own classes (see the README), but to save you the hassle, you can try this simple experiment:

• Make sure you have Plone 3.0.4 or newer installed.

• Put LinguaPlone in your Products directory

• (Re)start Zope

• ‘Site Setup’ → ‘Add/Remove Products’, install LinguaPlone

For the demonstration to make sense, we need to define a list of languages:

• Go to the Site Setup

• Click ‘Language Settings’

• Select 3-4 languages from the selection list. Note that the languages are listed in their native name, so the sorting might be a bit unexpected (Spanish is Espanol, for example)

• Press ‘Save’

Now we have a few languages to play with, and can go back to the Plone interface. Notice how you now have flags indicating your selected languages under the print/sendto area.

We now want to add a simple type:

• Add a ‘Page’.

• After filling out the type with some content and clicking ‘Save’, you will see that this content type has a pulldown menu, ‘Translate into’.

• Select a language you want to translate this document into.

• Save this translation.

• Try to switch languages by clicking the flags.

That’s a very simple use case for the multilingual types.

Developer Usage

You can test it by multilingual-enabling your existing AT content types (see instructions below), or by testing the simple included types. Don’t forget to select what languages should be available in ‘portal_languages’ in the ZMI. :)

Credits

LinguaPlone was donated to the Plone Foundation by Plone Solutions, March 2006.

Design and development –

“Plone Solutions”:http://www.plonesolutions.com (Alexander Limi, Dorneles Tremea, Geir Baekholt, Helge Tesdal, Stefan H. Holek)

Original design idea:

Object realms (Benjamin Saller, Kapil Thangavelu)

Funding and deployment, initial version:

Oxfam International

Additional funding/sponsorship:

Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Centre for New European studies (Jonathan Lewis)

Funding Plone 2.0.x compatibility:

Zope Japan Corporation (Takeshi Yamamoto)

Also many thanks to

Simon Eisenmann:

For doing the hard job of the first implementations (I18NLayer) we had to learn from before doing this.

Learning Lab Denmark:

For contributing and sponsoring the experience needed to build a multilingual solution.

Nate Aune:

For always pushing for the better solution and making us realise LinguaPlone had to be built.

Jodok Batlogg:

For extensive testing, deploying and feedback.

Sasha Vincic:

For testing and expanding and making cool new stuff happen with LinguaPlone, XLIFF import/export in particular.

Implementation details

try:
    from Products.LinguaPlone.public import *
except ImportError:
    # No multilingual support
    from Products.Archetypes.public import *

License

GNU General Public License, version 2.1