MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

net-carver · 2008-01-06 17:05:25

Andrija

Progress report: I’ve been working on the the plugin compatibility issue and now have rss_suparchive working nicely in an MLP site. I haven’t tried unlimited categories yet but I suspect that it will not be easy to integrate as it uses its own table and MLP will probably know nothing about it.

However, please don’t expect anything for at least a week as I want to do work on the other 2 areas I posted above for the next release too.

beztak · 2008-01-06 21:40:30

Unlimited categories works after small fixing… You can see it in work here (but site is in development – english and deutsch version isnt complete at all – only one article is pushed in english version but works as expected):

Czech version
English version

Last edited by beztak (2008-01-06 21:40:45)

beztak · 2008-01-06 21:44:30

Does anybody try and run succesfull wfCart based eshop on MLP? I have got several problems with wfCart class… On a site without MLP works perfect but with MLP doesnt work…

net-carver · 2008-01-07 05:29:05

Fixes / Features or Ideas I’m currently considering

Note:

These are in no particular order
They may not get implemented

ID	Fix / Feature / Idea	Status	Reason
001	Add a checkbox to the `snippet > search` tab to allow you to limit the searches to publicly available snippets.	Released	I often use this feature to locate snippets that already have the strings I want and then insert that string reference as a snippet in a page or form — only to have it fail to render on the public interface! That’s because I’ve found a string that Txp only loads on the admin interface and referenced that. Putting in a checkbox limiting the search output to public strings would avoid this hassle.
002	Improve the implementation of the language code handling.	Open	It has been noted that the pack cannot handle two different dialects of the same language on the same install. Whilst it may not make sense for a site to have Australian and British English, it is more likely that some sites will need to support this ability — particularly those wanting to support both simplified and traditional Chinese.
003	Fix for subdirectory installs.	Open	They just don’t work — especially on form submission
004	Provide a page/form localiser.	Open	Not sure exactly how this might turn out but the basic idea is to really streamline your work in replacing fixed strings in pages & forms with snippets. Currently I can think of a simple version that requires you to highlight text in the page/form textarea and then hit a ‘Snippetize This’ button that will take your highlighted text and turn it into a snippet — your original highlighted text being replaced by this snippet. The older brother of this feature would attempt to do it automatically to your entire page or form.
005	Add better support for installation of the pack into existing multi-lingual sites.	Open	Several people have contacted me about this and I’d like to see it done. Problem is that there’s no single way to handle language tagging of articles and then marking the relationship between such tagged articles as translations. Some people use categories, some use sections and others use custom fields. Hence, any such solution will have to be highly flexible and will need some considerable user interaction. I currently see this as something like another wizard which would walk the user through defining these mappings and then applying them.
006	Allow sorting on all fields	Open	The way the pack works right now means that some localised fields (eg, file descriptions) cannot be sorted as they give rise to ambiguous SQL statements. I need to revisit this area — but may not be able to fix it
007	Drop the `'l10n_articles'` table from the SQL database	Open	The `'textpattern'` table already holds all the information needed, why not use it? Could produce some code simplifications too.
008	Automatically populate fields and append their language name	Open	e.g. Category title fields would all be pre-populated with the category name + name of language. So category of “examples” on an English / Greek site would be given an English title “examples [English (GB)]” and in Greek “examples [Ελληνικά]”. The idea being to easily see which fields remain un-translated.
009	Add localised section titles to the output URL	Closed	Requested here and here by Maniqui,
010	Allow the linking of renditions within an article, not just cloning.	Open	This would allow certain articles to appear in all renditions of the site.
011	Allow cloning by Rendition ID	Released	Requested here by ultramega.
012	More robust URL rewrites.	Done	The pack injects the language code into URLs that are sourced from itself. However, there are some situations it doesn’t yet handle correctly (relative URLs and those delimited unusually.)
013	Better plugin compatibility	Done	Some folks (Andrija and Kjeld) are starting to report incompatibilities with some plugins. Whilst I can’t fix them all, there are some steps the pack can take to improve the situation.
014	Show the localised category and section titles in the admin pages	Open	Kjeld has noted that the admin interface doesn’t show localised categories on the categories, renditions or write tabs. The public side works fine. I intend to make the categories and renditions page localise based on the language of the admin interface. ~~The write tab will localise based on the selected language of the rendition being worked on.~~ Decided to leave localisation with the chosen admin-side language.
015	Remove whitespace before DOCTYPE	Done	This was due to some trailing newlines after the closing `?>` in three of the pack’s files. Fixed now but not released yet.
016	Provide flag icon output from the l10n_lang_list tag.	Closed	The language list tag outputs a css class on each item in the list. You can use a stylesheet to add images if you desire to do so. Personally I think this doesn’t make sense as flags represent countries, not languages.
017	All the site name to be localised just like the site slogan	Closed	You can do this by simply replacing the Txp tag with a snippet called ##site_name## and then translating it.
018	Permlinks to images incorrectly get language marker inserted	Done	Kjeld found that his thumbnails’ popup links weren’t working due to the MLP pack rewriting the permlink urls pointing to images.
019	Urls to third party software on same domain not working	Done	Similar to 018, jano noticed the link to his domain’s forum not working. I have added an ‘exclude sections/areas” preference in the MLP preferences. You can now list any section or area that you want the MLP pack to exclude from the rewrites. This works well for external areas such as /css or /js and any other area (like Jano’s forum) you with to exclude.
020	l10n_lang_list limited to unordered list.	Done	Merged Stef’s code to provide wraptag and break attributes to the language list. Now you can have a select-box as a language picker.
021	Incompatible with glz_custom_fields when adding additional fields.	Done	This was due to glz_cf altering the structure of the textpattern table (adding or deleting extra custom-field columns.) In fact any plugin that alters textpattern would cause this incompatibility. Added a way to regenerate the per-language tables to match the changes whenever the textpattern table is detected as ‘changed’. Current implementation requires some knowledge of the plugin causing the problem. Future fix might be able to do this regardless of the source of the change.
022	Cloning limited to sticky or live renditions.	Done	Removed. Any rendition can now be cloned.
023	Feeds not working	Done	4.0.5 and above broke the MLP Pack’s method of injecting language markers into the feeds. Tentatively fixed but may not work for everyone. New preference added to control the feed behaviour.
024	Cannot hide WIP languages from the admin language list	Done	Added a hide_langs argument to the l10n_lang_list tag. This allows you to hide a specific list of languages from the public side but still add them to your site and work on getting the translated renditions ready.
025	Allow mass cloning	Done	See item 030.
026	No admin language picker if the `aro_myadmin` plugin is installed	Done	Fixed it to know how to insert into the `aro_myadmin` tab area.
027	Finding your form or plugin string can sometimes be hard work — if you have a lot of them.	Done	Added an extended live filter based on michaelb’s filter. This shows a filter box in several useful places (and in the case of strings, only if there are more than 10 items in the list.)
028	The `l10n_if_lang` tag has a wraptag attribute that defaults to a `div`. Should default to no-wrap by default.	Done	I agree with Jirka on this one.
029	Confusing logic for selection of language to serve to the visitor including, a session variable, browser accept-language headers and the site default language. Any way to simplify it?	Done	Adding a preference to take the browser accept-language headers totally out of the decision.
030	Allow some form of mass cloning	Done	Added a clone-all-from icon to each non-full language in the `MLP > Articles` table. You can hit this, then choose a non-empty source language and clone the lot.
031	Better admin-side searching for articles based on titles	Open	Requested here by ultramega. This can be partially solved with Stef Dawson’s smd_where_used plugin which can be made to locate based on title. However, finding the related renditions is not presently possible.
032	Admin language not switching from the `prefs > language` tab doesn’t stick	Open	Reported here by azw. When navigating out of the page, the admin interface switches back into whatever you had before. Seems the site-wide change made from the prefs > lang is not being seen by the per-user admin language selector.
033	Possible to use normal cookies rather than session cookies for language choice?	Open	Reported here by AndrijaM. Perfectly possible.
034	Please add localisation of the custom field names.	Done	Requested here by Redbot.
035	The description field labels need reworking for files (images too?)	Open	Requested here by Redbot.
036	Add sub-directory installation check	Open	Could help reduce support posts by fixing expectations or educating in this area.
037	Inconsistent snippet counting	Done	Snippet counts reported in the left-hand columns in pages and forms don’t always match the number of snippets shown when you click through to edit them. LH column was counting all occurrences — center column was counting unique occurrences.
038	Support for aro_myadmin	Done	Made the routine to rename the “articles” tab accessible and allowed snippet substitutions in admin-side dashboards
039	Support for zem_event	Open	Update the MLP Pack mechanism to allow fields in other plugins’ tables to be localised too.
040	l10n_permlink	Done	Requested here by Julián
041	l10n_inject_lang	Done	Force language injection into non-relative, contained URLs. Requested here by Julián to make Postmaster work.

Status values…

Open — recorded as a bug or idea. No work started on implementing the feature/fix yet.
Closed — I don’t intend implementing a proposed idea.
WIP — I am currently working on this feature/fix.
Done — Feature/fix implemented in the development version but not yet distributed.
Released — Done and released in a download.

Any others?

Last edited by net-carver (2008-09-04 13:09:35)

net-carver · 2008-01-07 05:32:11

beztak wrote:

Unlimited categories works after small fixing…

For my own reference, can you either post your fix here or get in contact via my website with your fixes so I can compare notes.

Kjeld · 2008-01-07 05:50:15

Wow, looks very good. If you drop the ‘l10n_articles’ table from the SQL database, will you make a wizard for removing the existing table or do we need to do that manually in MySQL-admin?

net-carver · 2008-01-07 06:02:09

Kjeld

That would be considered part of item 007. Not sure on the actual implementation — maybe a link from the help section, a new wizard or maybe just done automatically via a check on the admin side.

Remember that some of those items are “dreams” that may never happen.

Last edited by net-carver (2008-01-07 06:28:29)

Kjeld · 2008-01-07 06:07:00

All sound fine. As I have told you many times, I love what you’re doing and am a great fan of MLP. This just makes it even sweeter.

AndrijaM · 2008-01-07 20:07:51

Steve, thanks, looking forward for the next release.

Btw, sorry to bother you again, but my whole blog page is not showing, which is not related to those plugins. Can you point me in some direction, where to look?

Last edited by AndrijaM (2008-01-07 20:08:31)

guiguibonbon · 2008-01-08 00:40:07

Steve – you’re amazing.

And that comes from someone who is currently not using MLP, but still thinks you’re amazing.

Anyway, you got the point :)

net-carver · 2008-01-08 06:47:10

AndrijaM wrote:

Can you point me in some direction, where to look?

Can you set your site to debugging and post a tag trace from your blog page. Thank you.

ultramega · 2008-01-08 08:14:59

Allow cloning by Rendition ID  - Released

Haa, thanks for including this :)

Can I hope one thing more? Clone multiple articles at one time by selecting them from the list with a select-box. I have currently about 200 articles all now cloned manually… Of course it makes no differ if one is maintaining a new site, but this one already had original articles which were later given for translation.

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#541 2008-01-06 17:05:25

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

#542 2008-01-06 21:40:30

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

#543 2008-01-06 21:44:30

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

#544 2008-01-07 05:29:05

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

Fixes / Features or Ideas I’m currently considering

#545 2008-01-07 05:32:11

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

#546 2008-01-07 05:50:15

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

#547 2008-01-07 06:02:09

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

#548 2008-01-07 06:07:00

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

#549 2008-01-07 20:07:51

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

#550 2008-01-08 00:40:07

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

#551 2008-01-08 06:47:10

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

#552 2008-01-08 08:14:59

Re: MLP - The Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack

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