MLP Pack Feature Demonstration Site.

net-carver · 2006-12-18 05:41:38

After a long time working on the next version of l10n I’ve put up a demonstration site so you can take a look at what it provides for the site visitor. We are calling the next generation l10n the “MLP Pack” as it has grown substantially in both scope and size.

The site is setup in English, Greek and Algerian Arabic (actually, a mixture of Algerian and Arabic translations from Google’s new translation service—see later). If you have taken time to configure your browser language preferences to include any of those languages then the site should be served up to you in your prefered language straight away. You can switch between languages at any time by choosing one of the language links on the sidebar.

This strange choice of languages was made because of the ease of access to the source content (translations of the Bible) and to show off support for both left-to-right and right-to-left languages.

Browsing, language switching, commenting, searching, contact forms and feeds are all localised and direction adjusted as needed.

Apologies for poor translations.

As I don’t know either Greek or Algerian I have had to rely on on-line translation services from Altavista and Google so please don’t expect every string to read fluently in those languages. Please remember this is a technology demonstrator, not a content demonstrator.

However, Marios has re-translated most of the text from Babelfish so the Greek should be much improved now.

Potential Problems Rendering Polytonic Greek.

If there are some missing characters displayed when you visit the Greek pages please be aware this probably a font/browser issue. You will need to have a unicode font installed that has support for Greek (and the diacritic marks that it sometimes uses). Some fonts that support this are Titus Cyberbit Basic and Code 2000. There are others and you can find a link to the wikipedia unicode fonts page on the links area of the sidebar on the demo site.

Copyrights.

The Greek and English texts are public domain but I have had to withdraw the Arabic based texts as the copyright holder does not allow them to be used on other websites. Links are provided on those pages. I hope there is enough of it left for you to see the RTL support in action.

Credits.

Thanks to …

Stu for porting the Jentri theme.
Graeme Porteous for his gbp_admin_library (on which the MLP Pack depends) and v5 of his gbp_l10n plugin.
Marios Buttner for the fixing up (ok, re-translating) the Greek I got from Babelfish.
Dragondz for his work translating the TxP stirngs into Algerian Arabic.

The Site

The site is at http://mlp-demo.netcarving.com

Feedback, bug-reports and questions about the Multilingual aspects of this site are invited.

No feedback about the Jentri theme please.

Enjoy!

Last edited by net-carver (2006-12-21 09:18:54)

jelle · 2006-12-18 06:57:44

uwoh….i get the following error:
compact_code( NULL ).
Fatal error: Invalid type passed to LanguageHandler::compact_code() in /home/.jeremia/netcarving/mlp-demo.netcarving.com/textpattern/lib/l10n_base.php on line 250

net-carver · 2006-12-18 12:42:56

jelle

can you let me know what you were doing when you got the error? Also, which browser are you using and have you cookies enabled or disabled?

We should be able to track it down.

-jw- · 2006-12-18 12:46:06

I have the same thingie

1 just clicking the link in the first post
2 Firefox 1.5.0.8
3 cookies enabled

net-carver · 2006-12-18 12:54:45

Jan Willem

thanks for the info. Will look into it. Could you also let me know…

OS
what language FF is setup to request pages in. You can find it in FF Preferences > Advanced > ‘General’ tab > Languages — there should be something listed in there.

net-carver · 2006-12-18 13:04:57

Looks like I can reproduce it now.

You should be able to work around it by temporarily setting your browser to request pages in either English (en or en-gb or en-GB), Greek(el or el-gr or el-GR) or Algerian (ar, ar-dz or ar-DZ)

Working on it.

Last edited by net-carver (2006-12-18 13:07:50)

jelle · 2006-12-18 13:13:01

net-carver wrote:
You should be able to work around it by temporarily setting your browser to request pages in either English (en or en-gb or en-GB), Greek(el or el-gr or el-GR) or Algerian (ar, ar-dz or ar-DZ)

yup, that works. thanks steve.

marios · 2006-12-18 13:48:02

Looking Good Steve, working well from here.

regards, marios
( Display Issue fixed )

net-carver · 2006-12-18 14:19:43

jelle, Jan Willem,

should work now when you reset your FF language preferences to their initial values. Can you confirm?

-jw- · 2006-12-18 14:53:57

Steve, everything works great now. Thanks for the great work you’ve been doing on this. Defintiley can find a use for it. Thanks.

jw

ruud · 2006-12-18 15:41:39

Wow. Nice work!

Some feedback…

Looks like most pages can be reached by different URLS:

http://mlp-demo.netcarving.com/el/?id=87 (when switching languages)
http://mlp-demo.netcarving.com/el/article/87/acts-16 (permalink)

To prevent Google from indexing both pages separately, it would be nice if the same URL scheme were used in all links. (doing a search shows http://mlp-demo.netcarving.com/article/87/acts-16, although the actual link does contain a country code).

A similar thing happens on the home page:

http://mlp-demo.netcarving.com/
http://mlp-demo.netcarving.com/en

Only here it depends on the language preferences set in the browser. Suppose Google indexes a multi-language website. I assume it defaults to english. When a visitor clicks a search result in Google (without a language code in it) and their browser is set to a different language, they’d see a different document than the one Google found.
Is it possible to do a HTTP redirect to a language specific URL?

Last edited by ruud (2006-12-18 15:48:18)

maniqui · 2006-12-18 16:52:37

Although in the near future I think I won’t be needing this pack, it seems you have done a great and hard work. Maybe that was the reason you were away from forums, net-carving?

I don’t develope plug-ins but this Making your plugins MLP compatible option would be revolutionary, I think.

It would be nice to do a test with Zem Contact Reborn…

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2006-12-18 05:41:38