Admin > Languages: Order of languages

uli · 2018-01-20 00:58:20

Looks like languages in the Languages panel are sorted by their English names, not by their proper names: Bahasa Indonesia at the alphabetic position of Malay, Suomi at the position of Finnish, Latviešu after Lietuvių. Might be confusing for first-time installers who don’t discover their own language, then, while scanning the page quickly.

philwareham · 2018-01-20 11:14:28

Inclined to agree, if it’s possible. The languages at the moment are ordered by language code alphabetically (such as en-gb) but by actual name alphabetically would be more useful. Can you open an issue on GitHub please? Cheers!

etc · 2018-01-20 11:36:29

Sorry, I don’t see how ภาษาไทย compares to Русский?

phiw13 · 2018-01-20 12:18:20

etc wrote #308780:

Sorry, I don’t see how ภาษาไทย compares to Русский?

From North to South?

philwareham · 2018-01-20 18:21:15

Hmmm, that’s a good point. Didn’t consider non-Latin alphabets. Maybe we can show the actual language code on the languages panel too, which then gives a visual clue to the order?

gaekwad · 2018-01-21 00:02:44

While we’re at it – and I’ve held off on mentioning this as it might be too obtuse…

The Install, Remove and Update buttons are in English by default, until a non-English language is installed and then they’re in whatever site language is chosen.

Is it viable to replace these text labels with something iconic instead, perhaps with hover/alt text with the words for Install and Update in the respective Textpack language?

It’s a bit of a UI train wreck to have each language’s Install, Remove or Update string on the button itself, but something iconic would give more of a clue as to what’s required if a non-expert, non-English Textpattern person finds themselves in that panel.

A propos nothing, about 40% of the “it’s broken” feedback I get from the Textpattern demo site is that it’s in some whacky, non-English language.

…told you it was obtuse!

Bloke · 2018-01-23 14:21:24

gaekwad wrote #308789:

The Install, Remove and Update buttons are… in whatever site language is chosen.

Yes, they’re gTxt() string elements so are governed by the currently in-force UI language. But I see your point that it’s not ideal to have the language name itself localized and not the button actions.

Not really sure how to get round this. Even if we add the install/update gTxt strings into the “header” portion of the language files (which will then put them in the [common] group) we’d need some special code to display the gTxt() for each button not in the site UI language just for this panel.

Is it viable to replace these text labels with something iconic instead

This would be my preferred option if we can find some suitably international symbols. Anything in our icon pack/symbol font @philwareham?

Hover/alt would suffer from the same issue as above – dedicated code required, and strings would need moving to the top of the file, which is not something I’d relish at this stage. Or ever, in fact!

about 40% of the “it’s broken” feedback I get from the Textpattern demo site is that it’s in some whacky, non-English language.

There’s really not much else we can do about this. If the site’s in ar-dz and it’s not your native tongue, you just need to click randomly around until you find something that looks a bit languagey. Granted, when you’re there, it’d be cool to have button icons rather than text so at least you can figure out which button does what in the language tile that you do speak! The ‘x’ or trash seems fairly universal for ‘delete’ actions.

It’s the same on your phone. Go to the settings, pick a foreign language and go back to the home screen. Sure the ‘gear’ is easy to find the settings panel but from there, you’d probably still have to try each option until you found the right one unless you knew where it was.

Short of putting a language dropdown in the header bar, which is extra page weight and requires a little code refactorisation – not to mention switching admin language isn’t something you do every day – or a flag symbol of the current language in the menu bar so the Languages menu item stands out, I think we’re just going to have to live with it.

philwareham · 2018-01-23 15:08:24

I’m really not keen on adding ~50 extra translation strings to each Textpack to allow for translations of language names per language. I don’t want to have to also be tied to adding new language strings to those files every time we add a new language pack. So that isn’t an option! ;)

I’d also not be too keen on totally replacing button texts with icons. I would, however, be interested in adding icons to the text we already have there, since we already have the UI to do that.

Just need to choose suitable icons from the pile.

Bloke · 2018-01-23 15:17:30

I wasn’t advocating adding localised strings for each language, don’t worry! It was only moving the two strings “Install” and “Remove” to the top so we could read them. But that doesn’t solve the problem anyway, so is not something I want to do.

philwareham wrote #308822:

I would, however, be interested in adding icons to the text we already have there

How about the +/- icons for add and remove, respectively? Either in circles or squares or bare. The minus in a circle always looks like “No entry” to me, but if it’s located near a ‘plus’ the ambiguity might be reduced.

Last edited by Bloke (2018-01-23 15:32:30)

philwareham · 2018-01-23 15:45:44

How about this? (the first row) – forget that the icons are wrong colour, it’s just a quick hack together.

I’ve also put the language codes on that row, which gives a visual clue as to the order the languages are listed in – negating the fact that fi is Suomi but appears in the ‘Fs’, and suchlike, as alluded to in the original post above.

I guess the icon on update button isn’t essential.

Bloke · 2018-01-23 15:50:09

Yes! I like the three-icon approach.

Does it make sense to put the language code inline with the language name, or does that look crap?

philwareham · 2018-01-23 16:07:00

Bloke wrote #308826:

Does it make sense to put the language code inline with the language name, or does that look crap?

Tried that – looked crap. OK I’ll put some CSS/PHP in place tomorrow to get this into core. Got work stuff to do now.

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#1 2018-01-20 00:58:20