[Zope-PTK] Internationalization

[Jochen Haeberle]

Joachim,

At 11:13 Uhr +0100 26.01.2000, Joachim Werner wrote:
>I'd like to support Jochen with that.

thanks! :-)

>There should be full Internationalization support in Zope! I know that this is
>not an easy task because it means that EACH AND EVERY user-readable 
>text that as
>of know is just put directly into the DTML has to be replaced by
>variables/hooks.

Yes, if you need it, for sure! But Zope has great ways of separating
content from code and design, so internationalization fits in very
good, I guess.
Let's face it, not everyone needs this, so I guess a way to leave the
standard way of doing pages with dtml and switch to language support
later would be it. This way you could build your logic in one
language and keep all the structural, important text in the dtmls and
add internationailzation later on, when the logic works. And all the
sites doing only one language won't be bothered.

>But without proper internationalization, Zope won't be useful for a lot of use
>scenarios!

There aren't many products out there that have a good implementation
of multi-language support - I can't think of one at the moment... so
that could be another area where Zope really shines.

>In fact, that isn't a PTK issue but a general Zope issue. But the PTK would be
>a good place for a first try ...

Mhmm, I guess that goes for many of the PTK features, that's all a 
question on how you define a portal, isn't it? The Portals I imagine 
all could need some good internationalization!

>There seems to be some work in progress on internationalization (The
>Internationalization ZClasses ...), but I haven't checked that in 
>detail yet as
>the release notes sound very alpha.

I saw these as well, I have no clue how this is supposed to work and 
if it's what I need...

>I think the Zope framework offers a lot of opportunities for implementing
>internationalization. E.g. one could simply create a ZClass that has 
>properties
>for all required translation strings and checks for a language preference (set
>in the user profile or by a cookie) to return the corresponding string.

Ah, and the structural texts mentioned earlier needed to be
translated could be hold in a special tab somewhere up in the
hirarchy and would be acquired throughout the site - great!

Jochen