[Pmwiki-users] Wikis with multiple languages

[Patrick R. Michaud]

At the moment I don't have many ideas about how to effectively
implement what you're looking for, but here are a few quick thoughts 
about some of it...

Instead of using five dollar signs as the markup (e.g., '$$$$$de'), I'd
use "=lang de" or something equivalent.  And instead of explicitly
saying '$$$$$default', I'd use just '=lang' with no language specifier
to indicate parts that are always shown (or, if you're sticking with the 
dollar signs, just five dollar signs with no language modifier following
them).

It's probably not possible to do what you want simply using the $DoubleBrackets
and $InlineReplacements arrays described previously; it'd probably have to
go into $BrowseDirectives, and the processing of $BrowseDirectives currently
doesn't support this.  Alternately you could put a wrapper function around
the call to PrintText from $HandleBrowseFmt that does the language 
preprocessing you want.  This is the most likely approach.

Some other ideas (probably not what you're looking for but I'm just
brainstorming here...):

1.  Maintain the pages in separate groups, but modify the Edit form so 
that each language version appears on the same page in its own
edit box.  This would help to maintain consistency between versions.
However, I'm guessing that you're wanting the pages to have some sections
of language-specific text and other sections of shared text, so this doesn't
work exactly right either.

2.  Instead of trying to figure out what happens upon displaying the 
text, process it at the time of posting the text.  You could have a 
master edit page with the =lang sections, but when it's posted the 
post routine handles the various language-specific portions
and saves each in the appropriate language group.

3.  There's currently a proposal for a "conditional markup" feature
where sections of markup text in a page can be included or excluded 
based on a variety of conditions, see 
http://www.pmichaud.com/wiki/Development/ConditionalMarkup .  
It wouldn't be hard to include "language settings" in such a feature--
i.e., to include or exclude text based on a language settings.
However, this feature has received very few votes on
http://www.pmichaud.com/wiki/Development/DevelopmentPriority so
I haven't given it much thought at the moment.

-----

One last note:  Even if it can't be easily implemented at this time,
this request really helps me guide PmWiki development because it points
out areas where the current document handling is a bit weak, and I can
start to tweak PmWiki's internals to be able to handle such things much
easier.  So, even if we can't get it to work in the current version, I
may be able to change things around in 0.6 or 0.7 to be able to support
this sort of thing in the future.

Pm


On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 10:49:16PM +0100, Eike Decker wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Introduction: 
> I have set up a couple of PMwikis till today and most of them had the
> requirement to support multiple language - the visitor should be able to switch
> the displayed language of the whole page. There were only two solutions for me
> and I tried both: One is to set up different groups for the different languages
> by appending the language letters (de / fr / en ... ), but with exactly the
> same
> pagenames to switch without problems between the languages. The other way is,
> to
> include all wanted languages in a single wikipage with a special syntax. 
> Both methods have advances and disadvantages. For me, I prefer to include the
> languages in one file since it is much easier to maintain because everything is
> kept close together. On the other hand, it looks more ugly to for the user if
> he
> edits the page. 
> However, this feature is one of the most wanted wishes by the people I am
> working for (normally they want to present their pages in their own language
> and in english).
> 
> So I would like to discuss about this feature, since I have to use a special
> syntax and I am not an advanced PHP programmer.
> As said before, I would prefer to include all the languages in one file -
> currently I do this by using a syntax like the divider (----): 5 dollars plus
> the language code mark the following lines as the chosen language in a single
> line - for example
> '$$$$$de' choses german, '$$$$$en' english and '$$$$$default' marks parts that
> are always shown. 
> The problem for me was to enable this kind of feature - I only managed to do
> this by modifying the printtext() function which is currently cutting the
> unwanted language parts simply away (additionally it stores the available
> languages in a variable to chose one of them). But I guess that should be also
> possible by using the
> regex functions provided by you (maybe you can give me a hint ;)).
> Last but not least the wiki has to remember the chosen language and thatfor
> I've
> chosen the phpsessions.
> 
> So my first problem here is: Is the syntax well chosen or not?
> And the second problem is: Can you give me a hint to implement this a little
> bit
> better (completly in an external php file)?
> And is there a way to connect all this with the internationalizations from the
> cookbook? Currently the pmwiki documents are seperatly translated into groups
> with the language strings appended (PmWikiDe / PmWikiFr ...). So there's a
> little contradiction to my prefferred model...
> 
> So what do you think about all this?
> 
> best regards
> Eike Decker
> 
> --
> Pmwiki-users mailing list
> Pmwiki-users at pmichaud.com
> http://pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users_pmichaud.com